Link Rot

Link Rot: The condition of HTML links going bad due to changes in the destination site's url tree.

Link Rot happens. Link Rot Deniers lie through their teeth. OK, I don't really think there are Link Rot Deniers, but there are definitely those who don't check their posted links for Link Rot as often as they should.

I spent six hours yesterday preparing an errata sheet for a web site I stumbled across; don't ask why I did this, I'm not totally sure why myself. And that was just for a quarter of the categories based off of one page of their site. Most of their link pages hadn't been updated since 2011. I had 24 corrections for them; in a couple of cases I couldn't find a current site to replace the dead link, but most of them I was able to provide the current url.

In the process of tracking down current urls, I found out dated links on two other sites referring to the url I was trying to update. So when I found the current url, I informed them as well. I'm not going to name names here, but one of the sites is run by a chap who sends out notices about its existence to the major mailing lists of that interest group on a monthly basis. He had links to GeoCities in his list. GeoCities shut down all operations outside of Japan in 2009, for crying out loud!

The url that lead me to his site, the one I was looking for a replacement to, well, the other site knew it was bad, so they had provided a link to an Internet Archive backup of it. Which was a good temporary fix, except, as they noted, it was a music lyric/sound file site, and the .midi files hadn't been grabbed by the Wayback Machine. However, they had enough information about the purpose of the site, which hadn't been provided by the first site, the one that started all of this, that I was then able to find the current site for the organization that all three sites had bad urls for. So there are three sites which, hopefully, will shortly have active links to that organization again, and one site that will, hopefully, have 24 links corrected shortly.

Now, I will admit that I got a bit snarky in one of my emails, pointing out that GeoCities had shut down operations in 2009, which was pretty common knowledge, so there was no excuse for still having a link to a GeoCities site on his link list.

This morning, getting up somewhat later than usual (I finished all of that activity at nearly 2:00 AM), I decided that if I was going to get snarky about other people's Link Rot, maybe I should look at the links in my Blog postings. So I did. Got side tracked a couple of times, but all of my blog posts are now up to date in regard to referring urls. And I updated product availability and price information as well, as annotations, leaving the original information intact, except for turning off invalid product links. With only a couple of exceptions, I changed from linking directly to a sub page to linking just to the home page, and then providing the information needed to use the home page search engine to find the proper sub page. Those exceptions were for sites where, as far as I could tell, they hadn't changed their directory tree schema; they might have added and removed pages, but they hadn't changed the url of an existing, retained, page. It's sad just how few such stable web sites I found. While some url changes are perfectly understandable, such as when your domain owner goes out of business, others reflected the realization that they hadn't put proper effort into their initial web site structure development. Still others reflected organizational changes that required site structure changes to be able to function in a reasonable manner. Anyway, when I found such a stable web site, one that hadn't changed it's url structure since I posted links to it in 2008, I sent them messages letting them know how much this was appreciated, and commending their initial web site design initiative for being so successful.

I'm not staying up as late as yesterday.

Post this Puppy!