Re: Link Management

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 08:43:07 +1000, James Robertson wrote
>
> * When human-friendly URLs are published, there needs to be some
>    further management of the published site. The best approach I've seen
>    is to track whenever a page is moved, and to *automatically* 
> create   a redirect on the published site to the new page location. 
> Works very   nicely!

I hadn't even considered vanity URLs as potential broken links.  We recently
went through a site redesign and set up the 404 page to read a CSV mapping old
URLs to new URLs and redirecting if a match could be found.  It logged the
activity including referrer with the intention that we could update the
linking items, but there was too much data (mostly favicon.ico or something)
and never enough resources to manage it.  But automatic creation of such a
table with manual maintenance seems valuable.

> Surprisingly, some of the very largest vendors don't provide any link
> management at all!

I am very familiar with one such vendor.  After four years I still don't
really understand the CMS industry - there seems to be a great deal of overlap
in functionality between products, but no truly amazing solutions.  Vendors
seem focussed on locking customers into their proprietary solution and
expanding their market by product line instead of rectifying their core
competencies.  It is terrible that software companies generally reach success
based on marketing rather than technical competency.