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Infinite maintenance case study

 •  • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

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.

PainSci Member Login » Submit your email to unlock member content. If you can’t remember/access your registration email, please contact me. ~ Paul Ingraham, PainSci Publisher