I tend not to write blogposts about the little scripts I write to organize my
website. They tend to be fairly basic bash scripts and I don't find them
exceptionally interesting or special. Though, the script I just wrote is too
funny to ignore. It's also quite embarrassing, but I'm choosing to laugh at
this instead of be hurt by it
I've built just about the entire "framework" for my site here. You can find it on GitHub or read more about it here. I frequently update these scripts as I add more pages to my site and want to create new functionality. I try to write scripts that don't require much upkeep so that I don't have to rewrite the scripts every time I add to my site. I'm slowly getting closer to "self sufficient" and most of the time when I add content, I don't need to rewrite the entire "framework". One of the things I did today was start to compartmentalize the build script into multiple smaller build scripts so I don't need to rebuild the entire site if I only change one page in one section. This got fairly time consuming as I add more content.
The other absurd, inefficient, and inaccurate time sink was checking my links. I basically would go through every page I was going to add, then clicked on every link to make sure they all worked. This was absurdly time consuming and wildly inaccurate. Then, when I fixed things in my scripts or changed structure, I didn't go and check every link again, and everything broke. On one hand, it's incredibly embarrassing I went through all of the work of trying to click on every link to check if they worked instead of finding a better solution. On the other hand, it's also hilarious how quickly I was able to figure out how to not do that.
Today, I wrote a bash script to check if the links on the certain page redirect to a page that exists on my site. When I ran the script on all the files in my site, I had another hilariously embarrassing situation. I got to see exactly how many broken links there were on my site. I guess it's embarrassing that I didn't realize how broken my site way. I guess it's embarrassing that I thought that clicking on links repeatedly was a smart solution and that I wouldn't miss the absurd amount of broken links that existed. At this point, I just find it flat out hilarious. It's one of those, "you live and learn" situations.
Anyway, the script took me all of an hour to actually write and fixes so many issues. All it does is cycle through the links I have on the site and check if the files actually exist. It's so simple, I find it hilarious how much effort I put into this before. As a side note, if you happened to stumble across my site and noticed every single link ever was broken, I hope that you didn't think too poorly of me.