My friend Barbara Feldman has written a very interesting article about techniques for avoiding what she calls “link rot”, when the links on your pages and in your print material end up being obsolete. If you’re just getting started with your site design, of course, this might not seem like anything you need to worry about, but I’ll bet you’ve gone to a site, seen a list of favorites, and found that most of them don’t exist any more.
I know that I have at least a few obsolete links on my site (and I can tell because of a tool I wrote and included in Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, which should be out any week now!)
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Barbara waxes poetic about ClickThruStats, a company that my partner Derek Scruggs and I created to help track link usage on Web sites. But nonetheless, it’s an article well worth reading.