This is what I entered:
Dear Ed Bott,
One of your older – but still very useful – articles has a broken link in it, twice repeated. I have the up to date link for you.
What follows are the details...
The article with the broken links:
Microsoft's hidden diagnostic tool unlocks Vista startup secrets
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/microsofts-hidden-diagnostic-tool-unlocks-vista-startup-secrets/246
The broken links itselves points to a 404 page:
http://content.zdnet.com/2346-12354_22-64715.html
Both instances should be updated, to point to the new, up-to-date location:
Troubleshoot slow starts with Vista's Event Viewer
http://www.zdnet.com/photos/troubleshoot-slow-starts-with-vistas-event-viewer/64715
Text of the two links that need to be updated:
"image gallery" (First occurrence of the phrase)
"Want to see how your computer measures up? Click here for step-by-step instructions with detailed illustrations."
–––
Additionally, a link on the gallery page itself is also broken. Details for that shall follow next...
The article with the broken link:
Troubleshoot slow starts with Vista's Event Viewer
http://www.zdnet.com/photos/troubleshoot-slow-starts-with-vistas-event-viewer/64715
The broken link itself points to a 404 page:
http://www.zdnet.com/photos/troubleshoot-slow-starts-with-vistas-event-viewer/"http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=246"
The correct URL would be:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/microsofts-hidden-diagnostic-tool-unlocks-vista-startup-secrets/246
(Or just http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=246 if you want to keep the short URL form as it appears to have been intended.)
Text of the link that needs to be updated:
"Microsoft's hidden diagnostic tool unlocks Vista startup secrets"
–––
The reason why the link described in the first part of this email broke is the retirement of the content.zdnet.com subdomain. I assume it was rather carelessly changed (mass-redirected) to just zdnet.com, by an administrator, who works/worked for ZDNet, but hopefully doesn't anymore.
The mistake that caused the link described in the second part of my email to break, is that you, your editor, a careless admin, or someone else replaced the set of quotes (" " ") surrounding the URL with html entities (""").
In the source code, this looks like:
<strong>Read the full story:<br><a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=246" target="_blank">Microsoft's hidden diagnostic tool unlocks Vista startup secrets</a></strong>
When it should really be:
<strong>Read the full story:<br><a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=246" target="_blank">Microsoft's hidden diagnostic tool unlocks Vista startup secrets</a></strong>
But you probably use a CMS with a WYSIWYG editor so the source code is largely irrelevant.
If this turns out to have been caused by a persistent problem with ZDNet's HTML-generator, then the entire database should be scanned and corrected via a script. I recommend you instruct the – hopefully new – administrators to look for – and correct – all occurrences of:
"href="", "" target="", and lastly "">"
Manual supervision of the script's execution in real time is recommended. Or log every time the replace function is called and review the logs afterward for false positives.
(A third, rather common cause for links to break is when someone forgets to include the protocol ("http://") in the link's href property. No web URLs will work without beginning with "http://". Additionally, while "www" in itself is not enough for a link to work, it is not even necessary. I actually prefer to use links without www in them. Although it doesn't hurt to keep it there, in most cases.)
I'd appreciate a response letting me know when the links are fixed, just so I can rest assured my efforts weren't in vain. And in the meanwhile, an acknowledgement of the issue should suffice.
Please do quote my full email at least in your first response, so that my mail server can properly archive a copy of my own communiqué for me.
And also because I'd like to verify that this contact form hasn't butchered my message; It is common for contact forms to attempt to strip html markup for example. That'd definitely ruin a paragraph or two...
Sincerely,
Daniel "3ICE" Berezvai
// I'm looking to buy an SSD. I found your article during my research. I visited the other articles because the first article I found linked to (or in this case merely tried and failed to link to) them.
ZDNet contact form
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Re: ZDNet contact form
We'll see how much of it got butchered by their contact form's possibly – but hopefully not – bad programming...
(I'll edit this once I get a response from Ed.)
(I'll edit this once I get a response from Ed.)
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