I enjoy working at Brightspot for many reasons, one of them being at the junction of cutting-edge software development with creative blogging and media design. Another reason is a combination of two different types of days:
- Brain Days—Lots of thought and analysis to accomplish a single task, such as publishing recommendations for improving site performance.
- Mindless Days—Zilcho thought to accomplish repetitive tasks, such as entering myriad URL redirects.
Brain-Days are the most satisfying, of course. Mindless Days, rare as they are, provide an effortless way of being productive. Regardless, Mindless Days lose their burnish rather quickly. After about 15 minutes, I start wondering, “What am I going to tell my children what I did at work today? That I replaced all instances of nine planets with eight planets in our 1,234 astronomy articles because Pluto was cruelly downgraded to being a rock?”
Similarly, entering redirects into Brightspot can quickly devolve into a very repetitive task. If you customized your path’s design, then a change from https://brightspot.com/sports to https://brightspot.com/athletics can potentially require redirecting every single asset under the old Sports section to the new Athletics section. In Brightspot’s standard edition, you can enter these redirects in the Vanity URL Redirect form. That’s a reasonable proposition for fifty or so assets, less reasonable for many more than that. Aside from being a time sink, perhaps the biggest risk of manually adding many redirects is replicating a mistake, requiring you spend additional time to correct them.
With Brightspot’s Redirect Importer extension, you prepare a Google Sheets with all the redirects. You can leverage Sheet’s features, such as find/replace and functions, to quickly design and populate the redirects. You then import the Sheets file into Brightspot and review the results.
Brightspot lists the imported redirects so you can review and adjust them as necessary.
The primary benefits of Redirect Imports is automating a possibly repetitive data entry task, and avoiding replication of mistakes.
