Autumn Cleaning

Summer vacation is over. School is back in session. Beach towels, lawn chairs, and bathing suits have been cleaned, washed off, and put away until next year. You could call it fall cleaning (the slightly cooler weather second-cousin to spring cleaning, but there is more than can be done than getting the house ready for autumn and winter. It can be time to clean your computer.

Take fifteen minutes a day, or if you have the time a half-hour or an hour, to do things like:

• Wipe the fingerprints off the screen
• Vacuum out the sand or other tiny granules that have found their way between the keys

• Back Up... back up... back up your hard drive
• Delete unneeded files (Yes, I put back up and delete in that order for a reason. You may have a slightly larger backup, but if you find out you need a file, the odds are better you will have it. If you delete first, there is no backup if you find you really didn't mean to get rid of it.

• Organize emails into folders and delete emails that contain dated or inaccurate information
• If you use a universal link, rescan it to see if any additional sites now carry your books
• Update pre-release posts and cover reveals to include the sales sites

 
There is another computer-related item that will apply to many of us. Update the website. Now I'm not just talking about cleaning out old posts that are no longer relevant. If a broken link scan hasn't been performed in a while, this is a good time to do so before the busy autumn season. Results of the check were a total of 3000 pages scanned and 57 broken links found. A couple were my fault where I put in the placeholder title of the article it was to link back to rather than the actual URL. Me bad. Then there were a couple where the author changed their website without putting in a redirect. They bad.

The items that constituted the most broken links were the result of the changing world.

• An ebook site going away
• A site's reorganization of their archives
• Sales sites no longer valid for books that were showcased on my site and which are no longer available or an updated version was published which resulted in a different ASIN, ISBN, and URL.

~till next time, Happy Cleaning, Halen