No, this post won’t tell you the secret to great writing. Obviously I am still looking for that myself. What it will do is discuss two plug-ins I recently added to my WordPress instance that are helping me to be a better blogger by catching broken links, and fixing the <gasp> hotlinks </gasp> that Windows Live Writer just makes oh so easy to do by accident.
Read on if you would like to learn more about these two great plug-ins.
Broken Link Checker
The Broken Link Checker plug-in is pretty nifty. You install it just like any other plug-in, and then you configure it through the edit settings link it lists in your plug-ins.
By default, the plug-in will check your existing content every three days…nice since sites don’t exactly give notice when they go away or move, and a link that works today might not tomorrow. 
As you can see, it is currently checking 6 links, and has detected over 1300 unique links across all my content. From here, I could also trigger an immediate check if I wanted to. There are other options for the CSS magick to apply to problem links, to add nofollow to broken links, etc. Two options that I really appreciate are that it will also check links in comments, and you can throttle this process so it will only run when server load is low. Very considerate of them to include this. If you seldom check your dashboard you can also tick the option to email you when broken links are detected.
If broken links or any redirects are detected, you will see a count next to the new link you can use to access the results in the tools section. The plug-in runs on its own, and goes through all your posts and checks the links to make sure that they still work. It can detect not only broken links, but links that are actually redirects as well. You have the option to fix them, remove them, strike them through, or edit them as necessary to get things nice and neat and avoid sending your readers off on a wild goose chase.
Broken Links is available for install from the WordPress Plugins screen, or you can go straight to the source at w-shadow.com.
Hot Linked Image Cacher
I hate hot-linking images. So imagine my embarrassment when I discovered that copying an image and pasting it into Windows Live Writer leads to exactly that…hot-linking the image instead of uploading it to your own server. Hotlinked Image Caching is an older plug-in, also available through the default WordPress add mechanism, or available from the author’s site at linewbie.com. While this has not been tested with WP3, it works on my site just fine. Install it, and then access it through the new link added to your Tools menu.
That will bring up the explanation of what this plug-in does, and let’s you launch it. Since I wanted to check all my content, I filled in ALL and clicked Get Started.
And then I hung my head in shame. I had a plethora of hotlinked images! But then I realised that most were hotlinked to my old blog networkplumbing.org (now defunct) and were actually in my Google account, so I felt better. Most, but not all.
I checked all of them, and clicked Cache These Images, and watched the plug-in go out, download the files, and update all the IMG tags in my posts.
The first time I ran it, it seemed to do fine with many of the images, but then it reported on some that it could not determine the file type…even though the file name ended in .jpg, or .png, etc. I figure that might have to do with either the number of boo-boos I made, or MIME type mappings on the host, so I ran it again and it seems to do just fine with most of those on a second pass. The rare one that failed still told me enough to let me go and fix my own screw-ups, and it is that which makes me a better blogger. No hot-links, no broken links. Yay!
Not quite as bad as broken links are broken wings. This 1985 hit by the band Mr. Mister hit #1 and was inspired by the book of the same name written by Khalil Gibran. As you can tell, I have a thing for 80s music, and B&W videos. Here I get a two-fer! Enjoy.
Direct link for RSS and email subscribers…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWyeVfuolT4
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