Proofreading used to be all about making sure misspellings were no where to be found and punctuation errors were non-existant. Today, we should add one more thing to the list. Make sure all of the links actually go where they’re supposed to.

One error I see many sites make is to forget the http:// before a link to an external site. It’s a simple thing to leave out but it leads people to an error page (or a funny 404 page if they’re lucky).

While I don’t think that computers and code can replace an editor, I did whip up a simple block of code to fix these mistakes. Simply drop the code after the break into your jQuery document.ready block and away you go. No if you happen to create a link like this one that doesn’t work, it’ll turn it into this one that does.

Obviously this is a super simple example and it could be improved upon but it’s a first stab at making the web a little better.