URL gone

A URL the site published before now has nothing at it. A reader following an old link or a bookmark, or a search engine, finds nothing there.

What you’ll see

warning  URL gone: `/about/` was published before, and nothing is there now
  Redirect it with `redirect_from: [/about/]` in the page that took its place, or take it out of `published.txt` if it is gone for good.
  More: https://statac.dev/e/url-gone/

In the terminal, the message also shows the file and line, if there is one, and marks the exact text.

Why Statac warns

Each time it builds the site, and as statac serve runs, Statac adds every URL it published to published.txt at the top of the site’s folder: each page from a file, each old URL in a redirect_from, each feed, and each file published unchanged. Drafts and scheduled posts aren’t added until they are published. Commit the file with the site, so a build on any machine knows the same URLs.

If a URL first appears while statac serve runs and goes again before it stops, such as a page renamed while you were still writing it, Statac takes it out of the file and says nothing.

When a page is renamed, moved, or given another permalink, its old URL is no longer published, and nothing else would tell you. Statac builds the site as usual, and warns at the URL’s line in published.txt.

Statac doesn’t keep the list pages it makes, such as a tag’s, or paginated pages, since they come and go with what is listed. Nor does it keep the files in assets/, whose URLs change when their contents do.

How to fix it

If the page moved, add its old URL to the page’s redirect_from in its new place, and the old URL then redirects to it.

If it is gone for good, take its line out of published.txt, and Statac stops warning about it. In an editor with Statac’s extension, the warning offers to do that for you.

If every URL Statac kept under a folder is gone, such as when you take away a whole part of the site, Statac gives one warning for them all, at the outermost folder they share, and the editor offers to take all their lines out at once.

Once you have understood the warning, you can quieten it by name.

Example

content/about.md was published at /about/, and was renamed content/about-us.md, so it is now published at /about-us/. Redirect the old URL to it:

---
title: About us
redirect_from: [/about/]
---

Its name

Name	url-gone
In the terminal	statac explain url-gone
To stop showing it	quiet: [url-gone] in statac.yaml, once you have understood it. Statac still counts it.