Tuesday 24 August 2010

Oracle's Broken Links

It seems that like me, people like Tim Hall are finding some of the changes regarding the amalgamation of sites within Oracle a little frustrating.

I've noticed many of the comments within OTN contain links to pages that just aren't there any more.

This OTN entry here mentions a vital link to
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/application_express/howtos/how_to_create_custom_popups.html
which unfortunately redirects to the Oracle Apex overview page
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/apex/overview/index.html

In an effort to find the contents of this page, I used my friend Google. I took a key part of the URL and used a special search facility that Google has:
inurl:how_to_create_custom_popups

This gave me three results

  1. The original document, which still redirects to the overview page. However, if you click the cached link next the described URL, you can open Google's cached version of the page - which should usually suffice.
  2. Some Xmarks widget, which didn't help me - but I do recommend Xmarks, by the way.
  3. A Japanese hosted version of this page. Google offered to translate it for me, which worked very well. This also solved my problem.

So until Oracle gets up to speed with all the older links, perhaps give the inurl: search option a go.

ScottWE

ps - congrats to Tim for his recent induction into the OakTable Network.

2 comments:

Tim... said...

Hi.

I've seen lots of broken/misdirected links on OTN articles and the OTN forums.

What's more, the new URLs are not very descriptive. Most of the old URLs contained references about the technology they were pointing to. Look at the new one for ASMLib:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/linux/index-101839.html

Ah "index-101839", of course it must be asmlib... :)

Cheers

Tim...

Scott Wesley said...

You mean you didn't know what index-101839 was? I thought everybody did?

Now they could start playing with these numbers like people do on licence plates I suppose.