Some elements of my job can be very, very time consuming. Sometimes I slack on things that take large amounts of my time.

For instance, checking for broken links. The first time I did it, I ended up with… 42 pages of them. About 1/2 were corrected by the people assigned those portions of the web site. Over the years the total on my server has decreased somewhat.

I believe we are down to about 1069 of them. Still quite a lot. Consider we have 38,696 HTML files. That is only 1/36? Not too terribly bad.

This morning I took a tool I found a while back and added some scripting to the report generator to make it send an email to the site’s owner alerting them to the availability of a new report. Also and made a template of the script which calls the program. I then worked out which elements of the script might change depending on the site and wrote a script to generate a new report. Should I need to just quickly check up on one site, then I can just run that report script.

Since the plan was to always run the broken link reports once a month, I worked out a master script which calls the others. A cron tab entry now makes this thing kick off on a certain day each month.

So now, I don’t even have to think about broken links unless to fix ones I may have made. I can also have it scan a site for broken links at will.

Next, I am going to do the same thing with the access log statistical analysis software.

One of my co-workers exclaimed, “Damn, that script is only 3 lines long!” :D Yep, I am replacing myself with really small shell scripts.

My theory has always been works smarter, not harder.

Preserved comments:

• 5/16/2003 3:07 AM by OEnone: “unless to fix ones I ~~may~~ have made. ”

  Just thought that *may* needed pointed out.  *laughs*

• 5/16/2003 4:19 PM by  sneezypb: For curiosity sake was I running scans of most sites I maintain in testing this script. Of ten sites I scanned there was 1 broken link.

  From a page my predecessor made.

• 5/19/2003 8:57 PM by goddessfourwinds: You kill me, Bear!  I rarely understand what you are talking about, and, yet, I cannot stand the thought of unsubscribing!!  I just don’t have the technical skill or knowledge you do.  I keep trying to find something in common, uh, other than that one thing we have *huge grin* that we could possible talk about.  I am still holding out hope!! Peace and love!  GFW