A postscript to last night’s update — though it worked on 99%+ of the posts, several posts that already had hyphens in them were resulting in 404 errors. If you’re running WordPress, I found two plugins that you should absolutely look into using:
- 404 Notifier. This monitors any 404 errors and notifies you by e-mail and/or by RSS feed. I have these notifications collecting in a Gmail label, which I can then scan for “popular” 404s (i.e., pages hit a lot) and correct them. Which leads to…
- Redirection. A simple plugin that is incredibly powerful, it lets you identify a “broken” URL and provide it with a good replacement, select which kind of redirect you want (301/302/307) and then it will implement the redirect and log stats on how many times the redirect has been hit.
Between the two of these, I’ve been able to identify and correct the handful of pages that didn’t get seamlessly handled last night. Just more evidence of how powerful and flexible the WordPress CMS is. (It should go without saying, but just in case: if you see anything out of the ordinary, just shoot me a note and let me know.)
4 responses to “More on the site update”
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So I followed your advise and installed both plugins. However, the 404 notifier is still notifying me about all of the links that are redirected. Did you encounter this, and did you come up with a solution?
Harald -I noticed the same thing… took me a while to realize that's what was happening. I imagine it has something to do with the order in which the plugins are executed. I'm going to drop the plugin authors a note and see what (if anything) they can recommend…–Rick