Uncomfortable Truth: Links Are Not Forever

If You Can Read This …

You’ve followed a link where the original target has gone missing and there is no meaningful substitute.  Link rot won.  When I find and mend such broken links, the substituted link brings you here when there is no meaningful alternative.  I can do no more.

What this is about.

Enduring Visibility

From time to time, I receive an email from some cyberspace denizen to report a broken link on an ancient in blog-years post of mine. 

It is gratifying that someone is examining such material.  I recognize that the link explorers are looking for places to propose substitution of links that they want promoted.  And the reports are valuable.  I trust this is satisfying and rewarding gig-economy effort.

Sometime, the report inspires me to find an appropriate substitute link,  not always one offered by the reporter unless there is context suitability.  In other cases, I cannot find any meaningful substitution whatsoever.

That was the case with this post from 2005-03-24.  There’s nothing to be done for it. 

In that and other cases, removing the hyperlinks makes the post somehow meaningless.  Maybe it is anyhow.  My alternative is to implement the present page as a target for all the cases where the target of links was essential to a blog narrative and the vanished linkees are subjects of discussion.

An Awkward Persistence

It’s pleasing to me that I can still repair all of those old blog posts and other web content of mine.  They were posted onto a web-hosting site of my own and backed up onto a local PC.  I’d adopted a site-server model implemented with a local installation of IIS Server integrated with FrontPage extensions and Visual Source Safe.  Synchronizing transfers and backups were, and still are, with WS_FTP.  I never relied on the Site Server product, but its deployment model, a remarkable form of source-controlled continuous integration supporting private review before public publishing.

The arrangement has been remarkable durable yet all of the software that I rely upon has been obsoleted.  With the failure of a Tablet PC running Windows XP that I access via XP clients under VirtualBox on Windows 10, this too might finally pass.

The Recent Items sidebar links on the page that inspired this post were all  broken for some other reason.  I suspect it was a Blogger hiccup.  That was another reason I used the no-longer-supported Blogger provision for publishing to my own site.

Note to Self: It would be valuable to replace the home pages of legacy/retired blogs with something that indicates where any continuation can be found.  While I have the technology.