[Techtalk] website overhaul/broken links

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Fri Jul 19 18:47:41 EST 2002


Malcolm-Rannirl wrote:
> On Friday 19 July 2002 10:08 am, Carla Schroder wrote:
> 
>>How practical is it, when giving a large, complex Website a complete
>>overhaul and re-design, to find a way to not break all the links? 
> 
> It depends on how the site is designed. It doesn't have to be that difficult.
> For the small website I admin, I just built a redirect file for all the 
> obvious ones, and then I got through the 404 log every so often and add any I 
> missed to the file.
> 

For a big, complicated site, you may want to set up the new site so that 
the namespace is disjoint (read: it's easy to tell if a URL is new or 
old.)  Then you can use a database or transformation script to generate 
the redirects for the old names.

By the way, kudos for taking the time to do this.  Far too many sites 
don't give a....

	-hpa




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