Friday, 05 March, 2004
Fixing broken links
If you've explored these pages at all in the last few days, you've probably noticed a few broken links and missing pictures. The transfer of my site to the new hosting provider didn't go 100 percent smoothly. You see, the old server was running Windows 2000, and this new server is running Linux. Under Linux, URLs are case sensitive. They're not under Windows. When I created the Windows site, for some reason I used mixed case on some of the directory names. This diary page, for example, was http://www.mischel.com/Diary/. All well and good, except that in some places I used "diary" instead of "Diary" for links, and people typing the thing into their browser's address line usually don't worry about case.
In order to reduce confusion, I wrote a program to make all the file and directory names lower case, and another to go through and make all of the internal hyperlinks lower case as well. That all works, but after I'd uploaded the files I realized that I'd forgotten to change the image tags in the HTML files. So many of the embedded images still aren't showing. I'll fix that in the next couple of days and re-upload the entire site again.
I knew, of course, about the case sensitivity of Apache on Linux. But in my rush to upload stuff to my new site, I didn't even think about it. Poor planning. It's a good thing I didn't have a client paying me for this, huh?