When websites go bad
Last night I had a horrible realisation. A part of my digital presence imploded, and I hadn’t even noticed.
Here I am pulling together bright minds to build next generation AI tools, when I realise that my website was broken. Not the "oh, there's a minor glitch" kind of broken, but the "why is nothing working?" kind of broken. My blogs weren't working. Every link led to home of fear and dread, 404, where my meticulously crafted (cough) words should have been.
Panic set in. What happened? A rogue plugin? A digital poltergeist? After a coffee, a handful of Haribo Pineapple Goldbears I found in the random cornershop down the road (never check the date, my friend) and me giving my giant desktop screen a glower to make it fear for its pixels, I discovered the culprit was a website update that had a little havoc party. Fun.
What’s worse – it probably happened MONTHS ago. When was the last time I clicked on my own blogs? I’ve been sending hundreds of people to the site in the last month. I’d be embarrassed, but that’s a luxury I didn’t have time for.
After some jiggery-pokey-keyboard and a few sacrificial offerings to the internet gods, I managed to get the blogs working again. When I thought the worst was over, I encountered a new, equally infuriating problem: all the images had to be reuploaded. DOUBLE YAY.
Imagine going through hundreds of blog posts, re-uploading and re-linking images?
You don’t have to. It was 31 blogs. It still felt like a REALLY LONG TIME though. Talk about the alt texts and metadata! It took me….no I didn’t do it. That’s a job for post-sleep Hannah.
As I slogged through the tedium, I reflected. Why had I stopped writing blogs in the first place? Fresh off the ‘professional writer’ treadmill 10 years ago, it was the easiest part of running a small business at the start. And then running a business took over. At some point I turned off the dates on the blogs, so a casual passer-by wouldn’t know I hadn’t bothered to write one for (cough) awhile. Oh, the apathy!
Would I dare to read some of my old posts from ten years ago?
Not a chance. I’d have culled them. Maybe they deserve it (they probably deserve it). But old writing, much like old lovers, should be viewed with a generous squint, preferably from a distance. I mean, I was still blonde back then, who am I to judge some hastily typed words?
I’m sure they are filled with puns and typos, as am I. I know what has changed. Instead of hours spent looking for the “right” image in a bout of stock-photo based procrastination, I’ll conjure one using AI in seconds. And for posterity, I’ll leave the dodgy text generation in place for future historians. I’ll probably ask it to proofread the blog and see if could be tightened, instead of leaving it in laptop limbo for me to view with fresh eyes in the morning. What hasn’t changed is my desire to be me. To learn. To impart that essential knowledge, which is this:
if just ONE of those generic “I reviewed your website and can help you reach 8 million customers” spam emails had instead said
“Hey babe, I think your blogs are broken”,
they probably would have got some business. Instead, here I am at 2am fixing tiny things no one said were broken, which it would have been really useful to know. Use AI to deliver a better service. To be more useful for the customer. Not to generate more spam that doesn’t help.
And maybe check your site once in a while for broken links. Hell, if you have time, check mine too!