Battling Link Rot on a Hugo Site

One of the hardest parts of keeping this site running as it ages has been staying on top of link rot. Having 18 years of links adds up, especially when you’re talking about tech that counts in days what the rest of the world counts in years. For a number of years I used Dr. Link Check to give me a report of broken links, which I’d then fix by hand. It’s been effective but this site has grown to a point where I need an ever-more-expensive plan to keep up with it all. That’s OK, but not ideal. Since moving back to Hugo, whose links are much easier to parse programmatically, I thought there had to be a better way. There is, and it’s called Lychee. Lychee is a Rust CLI utility that checks links programmatically and generates a report I can use to fix them. With Dr. Link Check I ran link checks once a year when I paid for a month of the service. With Lychee I run link checks automatically once a month or on demand, either as a GitHub Action or on my laptop. This means I can stay ahead of…