Last year, a combination of a loss of service from my hosting provider and my appalling backups meant that this website was temporarily wiped off the face of the Internet. It’s never recovered – at least not in terms of revenue – and it taught me an important lesson about backups (it’s all too easy to forget the hours of effort that go into a “hobby” site like this one…).

Whilst the blog posts were restored, and I took the opportunity to apply a new theme to the site (it’s probably due another one now…) but some of the images had got AWOL along the way. I’ve been ignoring that (mostly) but decided I really should do something about it when an old post was picked up by a journalist today and I realised it had a missing graphic.

I remembered a WordPress plugin that I used on another site recently, for managing redirects when access to the .htaccess file is not available. The plug-in, written by John Godley, is called Redirection, and one of its modules will report on HTTP 404 errors, like the ones that my missing graphics will create. I know there are other tools that can do this for me (Google’s Webmaster Tools, for example, or trawling through the web logs) but it’s an easy way to see when a 404 has been returned in order to investigate accordingly.  So far this afternoon, I’ve tracked down and replaced around 8 missing graphics and one broken permalink using the logs from Redirection.  I’m now scanning through the rest of John’s plugins to see what else I’m missing and will certainly be donating later…