Dead links in most MeiliSearch blog articles and related content

[bidoubiwa]

With the addition of the new documentation a lot of links broke. I did not have time to mention it in the review.

I created a small tool to determine if urls are still valid: https://github.com/bidoubiwa/vuepress-plugin-external-link-checks

A lot of dead links have been found in the different SDK's, and blog articles. I saw you made a lot of PR in the different SDK's but it could be interesting for you to see all the other breaking links in all meilisearch related articles/pages.

Here is a small preview of the results but it is only a small part:

We could maybe add this tool in the CI and the local tests.

[maryamsulemani97]

Hi @meilisearch/devrel-team 👋 This tool checks the blog for any docs dead links. Please let us know if we need to add any redirects. Thanks!

[bidoubiwa]

Since this tool is very very old, I cannot guarantee that it is still working

[ferdi05]

Hi @maryamsulemani97 thanks for the heads up. Is it only checking the docs dead links? Also have you found dead links in some content which will be part of the future Dev Hub?

[maryamsulemani97]

Hey! I think I didn't phrase it correctly, sorry 🙏 It's checking the blog for any dead links pointing to the documentation.

[ferdi05]

Hey @maryamsulemani97 I understood this part correctly, and I was wondering if we could extend this usage. Maybe what I didn't understand is what you meant by adding any redirects?

[maryamsulemani97]

Also have you found dead links in some content which will be part of the future Dev Hub?

Nope!

Maybe what I didn't understand is what you meant by adding any redirects?

We have a _redirects file where we update links as we move, rename, or delete pages so users with old links can still access them. For example, the link to the quick start used to be https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/tutorials/getting_started.html but now is https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/getting_started/quick_start.html. Since we added /learn/tutorials/getting_started.html to the _redirects file, users with the old link can still access the quick start instead of getting a page not found.

If there are any old links to the docs in the blog that aren't in the _redirects file, let us know and we'll update it.

Hope that was helpful 😄

[ferdi05]

Absolutely, thanks very much @maryamsulemani97 When we'll move the content out of the blog, we will need redirection. Ghost, our blogging platform, provides some as @Strift experimented today. The tool could be useful, but I wonder what are the site structure requirement to make it work @bidoubiwa ?

[bidoubiwa]

This is a very old tool. I think it is not suited for our needs today as it requires manually adding a lot of links. The best option would be to recreate a tool or find one online that might do the trick (which most certainly exists)

[bidoubiwa]

I made a new script to check the links @ferdi05. You can use it with the blog like this:

npm run start "https://blog.meilisearch.com/" "/"

[ferdi05]

this will be useful, thanks @bidoubiwa. I already found dead links

[guimachiavelli]

Since this issue is focussed on blog links, perhaps it's better to move it to the dev rel repo?

[guimachiavelli]

@Strift/@ferdi05 we can't do this ourselves because we don't have write access to the dev rel repo? Can you do it on your end?

Thanks!

[ferdi05]

@CaroFG transferred it, thanks!

[CaroFG]

Links were updated