Spent a fair chunk of last night cleaning up this very website, finding little bugs and squashing them (an ugly metaphor, but apt). This is part of my desire to get all of my web material cleaned up, darn it, and into a system whereby I can check it all and keep it all clean. I’d like to take regular sweeps of my sites to clean up little problems before they require a few hours of tweaking.
A good example from last night was a webpage footer I created about five years ago, back when my personal website was much smaller than it is now. This footer used neato tricks to display the last time the page was updated, automatically. Very handy: You could tell how old a page was, without any extra work on my part when I change it. Well, when I moved off of the server on which that trick worked, it stopped working. It hasn’t worked since.
But never removed those footers, and I used those pages to create other pages, until eventually those bad footers on dozens of pages. Ugh. Now that that’s fixed, even if that sort of thing happens again, I want to catch it before it spreads.
Thanks to my tickler file, I can do that.