With a new purpose for TechTraction.com I need to start cleaning up the content before I start working on the new design. Previous posts covered everything from eBay tips to daily reports from Lotusphere 2007. Since those topics no longer fit into my new purpose, they have to go. Of course once deleted any external links will fail. Fortunately, there weren’t any external links to these particular posts; however, just in case, I tweaked my 404 error page.

A 404 error is what you get when you follow a non-existent link. The standard error message is sparse and unfriendly. Since I don’t want to completely alienate a reader following a dead link I need to edit my 404 error and make it a little friendlier.

I use a modified version of the Abstrakt3c 3.0 WordPress theme by Kaushal Sheth which comes with 404 component as part of its theme. I added a better error message which includes a short apology for the missing page and a brief summary of TechTraction.com so the visitor gets a better idea of TechTraction’s purpose and hopefully might stay and look around even though what they originally came for no longer exists.

As much as I wanted to delete everything that was off topic, some of those posts had known external links and were mildly popular at one time. For those posts I’ve created a new category called “Off Topic”, reassigned those posts to that new category, and disabled comments on those posts. At some point in the future I do plan to delete those off topic posts.

Now that I’ve done some basic house cleaning and re-categorized a few off topic posts, I need to make sure that Google knows about the changes. I use the Google Sitemaps plugin by Arne Brachhold to automatically generate my sitemap.xml map for Google. Therefore from my WordPress Dashboard I select the Options tab and click on Sitemap. On this options page I click the “Rebuild Sitemap” button. The sitemap.xml file gets rebuilt which removes the deleted posts and Google gets notified that there is an updated version of sitemap.xml that its spiders can crawl.

Finally, the redesign is headed in the right direction. Most off topics have been delete and others have been re-categorized. The 404 error page has been updated so it’s more informative and friendly. The sitemap.xml file was updated and Google notified. Tomorrow I’ll start work on trimming the sidebars.

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