[Nfb-web] Affiliate Web Sites and broken links

Thu Aug 24 19:47:42 CDT 2006

Hello John and listers,

Another solution to prevent links from being broken is to export content
from the national site to affiliate and division Web Sites; particularly if
it's information likely to remain static. For example the Future Reflections
Issue, The Early Years contains material that is not likely to change. On
the other hand since The Braille Monitor section contains truck-loads of
information, and changes monthly a direct link to The Braille Monitors on
the national site is the best option. If anything this situation has taught
us to look more closely at the source of content for our Web sites and
decide whether to link to it on the national site, or to put in the extra
effort to export it and to create pages for it so it can live on the same
server as the division or affiliate site protecting it from link breakages
in the future.

    Thanks for your hard work, and your effort to keep us posted on the
progress in troubleshooting problems with these Web Sites.

Peter Donahue

 ----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Berggren, John" <JBerggren at nfb.org>
To: "NFB Webmaster's List" <nfb-web at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2006 2:08 PM
Subject: Re: [Nfb-web] Affiliate Web Sites and broken links

Greetings, Webmaster folk--

Unfortunately, the reality of migrating a Web site to a new layout
inevitably breaks a lot of hardwired links that exist elsewhere in the
world on Web sites and in bookmark lists and even in printed material.
I'm not sure there's much that can be done about making such a
transition painless.

However, Peter's suggestion that we give the affiliate Webmasters a
couple of weeks to play around before the go-live date could perhaps
reduce the level of inconvenience.  Of course, in this particular
instance, it may have been of limited value as we were migrating
truckloads of content right up until the last minute.  At any rate, this
is one of those items that goes onto the list of things we could do
better and will do better next time.  (Next time?!?)

I do recommend, for anybody that has more than a handful of pages to
manage, the periodic use of a broken link checker.  It's not uncommon
for infrequently-used links to go change over time.  We're in the
process of reducing a sizable list of links on the new national site,
either because linked content didn't migrate properly or because we
migrated already-broken links.

It appears that the problem with banquet speeches and presidential
reports is one of content that didn't migrate properly.  It's my hope
that this situation is remedied in the next few days.  With respect to
other broken links, we are working to implement customized HTTP 301
pages for old URLs.  This will at least get visitors to a place where
they can search for the content they were expecting to find.  I'll do my
best to keep folks posted on both of these issues.

Regards,
John

John Berggren
IT Director
National Federation of the Blind
1800 Johnson Street
Baltimore, MD  21230

P : 410-659-9314 x2329
F : 410-685-5653
E : jberggren at nfb.org

-----Original Message-----
From: nfb-web-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nfb-web-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Peter Donahue
Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2006 4:46 PM
To: NFB Webmaster's List
Subject: [Nfb-web] Affiliate Web Sites and broken links

Good afternoon everyone,

I want to suggest that all NFB Web Masters check all links on your
affiliate or division Web Sites to ensure they're all working. The
recent upgrade of our national Web site has reeked unforseen havoc on
many local and state affiliate, and division Web sites which access
content straight from our national Web Site. While we applaud the
efforts of our national office to give us a new and improved Web Site
what I believe was over-looked was the fact that many of us link
directly to specific content on the national site not realizing that
changes in this content and its where-abouts on the NFB server can cause
such links to be broken should alterations in the location of content on
the remote host be changed. When our new national site went on-line on
the first of this month direct links to content on the old Web site were
unintentionally broken making particular text, audio, and video content
inaccessible to site visitors.

    I'm beginning to, "Repair" the unintentioned damage to the NFB of
Tennessee Web Site by redirecting the URLS of the broken links to their
location on the new and much improved national NFB Web Site. Content not
likely to be changed very often will be localized to the same server as
the affiliate/division site to prevent such breakage in the future.
Guess I can now say that we've all had a harsh lesson that linking to
content on a remote Web site is not always a good idea.

    Sorry if this sounds like I'm complaining, but rather I want to urge
you all to check your sites for which you're responsible and to make the
necessary redirects so the information accessed directly from our
national Web Site will once again be available to your affiliate or
division's site visitors. The upside to this calamity is that now that
I've upgraded to JAWS 7.0 I'm able to make better use of Macromedia's
Contribute and Dream Weaver.
There's still a few focus issues with Code View in Dream Weaver, and in
the file editor in Contribute, but over-all they can be accessed far
better than they could with our previous version of JAWS. If I'm getting
this kind of results with JAWS 7.0 I can't wait to see the new version
of Dream Weaver under JAWS 7.0, and 7.1.

    Again my intention is not to whine and complain about the situation,
but to encourage y'all to check your Web Sites for bad links and to
redirect them to the new content on our national site so they work
properly once more. The NFBTN Site took somewhat of a beating in this
respect, but since much of the content was taken from the national site
and placed directly on the NFB Net server the carnage isn't as bad as it
could have been had I simply accessed all content directly from our
national Web Site.

    I'd be curious to know if anyone knows how soon the audio and video
content from the old web site will be working again so I can moddify the
links from the NFBTN Site so they work once more? Since I have just
about all of that content on my hard drive if this is going to be a
prolonged outage I'll need to come up with another work-around to get
them working again although I know I can restore some of it without too
much trouble.

    Let me wind it up by saying that since the new national site came
on-lineI've noticed that it loads faster and has much improved
responsiveness over the old Web Site. Am I the only one whose checked it
out? I was waiting to hear feedback from others on the new NFB Web Site.
I would also suggest that should future major upgrades of our national
site occur that the site be made available to NFB Webmasters for a
period of time prior to the launch for the general public to allow us to
moddify links to content being accessed directly from this site to
permit a smoother transition. Take care and have a great day.

Peter Donahue

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