Is this the way to fight linkrot?

And God Said: Let there be no more Linkrot explains how to use Apache to redirect users to pages after they've been moved. Noble idea, and I hate seeing dropped links after a site redesign/reorg, but this seems like an awful lot to have to do for each page that's moved.

I wonder if there's a better way. Maintain an index of old pages and their coresponding new names, and set up a custom 404 page to check that index and send an HTTP 301 pointing to the new page. Similar idea, but a couple advantages:

• A lot more user-friendly for the people managing the site (content managers) who may not neccessarily want to deal with .htaccess.
• Help the server admins by keeping people out of configuration files.
• Adaptable to any web server environment, not just Apache