Great software solves a problem that you have — plus problems you didn’t know you had.
Here’s an example: today on Twitter, a friend let me know about a broken link to one of my old posts:
The broken link lives in someone else’s blog post, so I can’t update the source. It looks like the link has been broken since I migrated from Blogger to WordPress.com some months ago. Darn!
Ideally, the old link would redirect to the correct one, the one Gary found after a bunch of looking. This would fix the internet (just a tiny bit).
How hard is it to make that work?
Look at this beautiful plugin that appears right at the top when I search for “redirect”:
Perfect. I installed it (thanks to $23/month to WordPress.com for my business site) and entered the two URLs and poof, the redirect worked. That took under 10 minutes.
But wait! There’s more!
During the installation it asked me whether I wanted logs of 301s (requests to my site that got redirected to the right place) and 404s (requests to my site for a page that is not found). Yeah, sure.
After entering the one redirect I knew about, I saw it work in the log of 301s. Then I clicked on the 404 report, and in that couple minutes it had already noticed two more broken requests!
So I fixed those too! Hovering over the link in the report even gives an “Add redirect” option that populates half of it for me. Amazing.
This Redirection plugin is great software. It worked to solve my specific problem. It teaches me more about the wider problems I’m having, and helps me solve those too. Brilliant.