Happy National Lighthouse Day! I hail from the land of lighthouses and lobsters, so today feels like a particularly nice day to share some choppy waters we've overcome (bugs) as well as some bright horizons we've crossed into (improvements).
URL Checker improvements
Earlier this year, we released a pretty big re-do of our URL Checker (the tool formerly known as the Broken link checker) and from that came some really great customer feedback. As we are wont to do around here, we took that feedback and made some more improvements. The major changes are:
- We now classify links into one of three categories to have a bit more nuance:
- Broken: The link throws a 404 error or another known bad HTTP status code. This is definitely worth reviewing, though there are still occasional false errors.
- No issues found: These links seem functioning just fine, so you shouldn't need to review them if you're checking for broken links.
- Review: We can't quite make an automated judgment on this, so we think it's ambiguous and needs review. These are worth manually reviewing to check if they're working properly.
- We include the Status Text to accompany the HTTP status code, which may save you from having to research what a code means.
- When no link text exists but it's in the body of an article, instead of an empty cell for Link Text, we include
[No visible link text].
Bugs we have vanquished
- Topic articles were not visible in previews, which made previewing the article rather pointless. We've fixed this, so now you can see what the topic article will look like within the context that you add it when you preview it.
- We had a really wacky bug where sometimes folks' knowledge bases were creating blank PDFs. We finally found the culprit, and it was happening when there was information added to the custom head area of your knowledge base in a specific order. Weird! Well, now that's resolved so no more blank PDFs!
- An unrelated PDF bug led to particularly large custom or standard PDF exports not generating at all. That's been handled, so you can go ahead and generate those big boys confidently again.
- If you received a bounced-email delivery error in your Reader emails, you may have faced a bug that wouldn't let you effectively clear that error. Selecting Clear this warning would just repeat the same broken behavior instead of actually clearing it, so the warning could never be resolved. We've fixed that now, so you can dismiss those warnings without any grief.