Cleaning Up My Online Real Estate

For Project DO this past week, I did a major cleanup of my online real estate. For this blog and two others, I went through every post and checked every link. Finding and fixing broken links was only part of the game plan, however. I also revised many posts and deleted several, too. The deleted posts were mostly sponsored posts (which I don’t do anymore) from back in 2010. Many posts needed revision due to obsolete links and content – those mentioning and linking to my Suite 101 or eHow articles which no longer exist, for instance.

Going forward, I plan to be so much more careful about linking. While including links to relevant content on other sites and blogs is a great idea, my big cleanup has shown me that doing so may not pan out so well. So from now on, unless a site looks completely rock solid to me, I’ll likely not link to it – I really don’t want to deal with all the broken links again due to whole websites or specific content vanishing from cyberspace.

And I'm cleaning up my hard drive, too!

A related area I tackled is my filing system for posts – boy, have I ever created a mess! From here on out, I’m filing all posts by subcategory within each blog or site folder rather than having all posts jumbled up in one folder per blog or site. For instance, all my Project DO posts will be in the Project DO folder, which is filed under this blog. Now, why didn’t I think of this before? Well, partly because way back when I started blogging, I didn’t think far enough ahead to consider what it would be like when I had hundreds of posts.

I also plan to rename all my post documents to match the actual post title. Huh? Why on earth would they not be that way already? Well, because I often come up with a different title when publishing and just didn’t think to go back and change the doc names to match. And not only am I going to update all my doc names slowly over time, but I’m going to be meticulous about further organizing future post docs by adding an identifier when appropriate. For instance, my doc for this post will have W3 as the beginning of the doc name so that I can easily find a specific week’s post on my hard drive if I want. And beings all the Project DO posts will be in the Project DO folder, they’ll all also be in order.

And last but not least, I’m now separating out drafts and ideas from published posts, which I’ll move to a designated ‘published’ folder when they go live. And I’m including a blog identifier in the folder names so I can easily differentiate between blogs. This way, I avoid having subfolders with the same name inside multiple files – after all, I’d hate to have too many folders all named ‘published’ scattered across my hard drive.

Project DO Progress – Week 3

·         Ran a link checker on all blogs and sites (no broken links on 4 sites – yippee!)

·         Found/fixed broken links on 3 blogs (well, maybe not all fixed but I know about them and am working on it!)

·         Deleted obsolete posts (35 from 2010 and 3 from 2009)

·         Developed a way better filing system for my posts

In addition to all of the above, I got a decent start on reorganizing the rest of my computer files, too. But that’s another post!

So...

Do you have online real estate and/or computer files in need of a major cleanup? If so, set aside 10 or 15 minutes each day and tackle one task at a time. And before you know it, you’ll be done!