Infinite maintenance case study
Recently I identified about 90 broken links to other websites scattered around PainScience.com — an accumulation of about three years worth, since I last checked them. I just spent forty-five minutes fixing … six of them. Ugh!
Why so long? I link like it matters, because it does, and if something I linked to is truly gone — not just moved — then there’s a genuine need to track down something equivalent. Sometimes it’s easy, but in many cases it requires actual research, and the quality of the information definitely depends on finding a decent replacement. Come to think of it, I actually got lucky taking only 45 minutes to replace 6 links.
So I’ll chip away at the other several dozen broken links over the next several weeks, a to-do item that will pop up on my list every few days, just one of dozens of other projects that can’t be done in one sitting.
And that’s why my job is full-time! And why there must be revenue: to support the infinite maintenance that any good quality educational site inevitably requires. There are some fantastic amateur blogs about musculoskeletal medicine these days, of course, but I guess that less than 5% of them are even trying to go back and do maintenance like this. Because it’s just not economically or logistically feasible.