blog!

[edent@mastodon.social]

blog! “How bad is link-rot on my blog?”

I read this brilliant blog post by Wouter Groeneveld looking at how many dead links there were on his blog. I thought I'd try something similar.

What is a broken link?

Every day, I look at the On This Day page of my blog and look at that day's historic posts. I click on every link to see if it is still working. If it isn't, I have a…

Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/12/how-bad-is-link-rot-on-my-blog/
⸻
#blog #meta #statistics

[mlanger@mastodon.world]

@Edent I like this idea. I should probably add an "on this day" page to my blog. The blog is 21 years old now, so it might take a while to accomplish the daily check.

[edent@mastodon.social]

@mlanger mine is a similar vintage. If you use WordPress, I've written a quick plugin.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2016/11/an-on-this-day-plug-for-wordpress/

[mlanger@mastodon.world]

@Edent Ironically, when I tried the link in the post to test it, I got a 404 error message.

Terence Eden’s Blog

Terence Eden’s Blog (shkspr.mobi)

[edent@mastodon.social]

@mlanger ah, ive now changed it to https://shkspr.mobi/blog/on-this-day/

Will update that post. Ta!

[prijks@fedi.esgeroth.org]

@Edent I did a similar exercise a couple years ago: https://www.esgeroth.org/log/entry/1893

I haven't tended to my digital garden by fixing any of those links yet. Your post is inspiring me to do so. I have two questions, if you don't mind: what is your reasoning for removing the link entirely if you can't find a good replacement? Do you leave any sort of hint that it once was a link?

[edent@mastodon.social]

@prijks for some things, I can see that a broken link might have semantic value. E.g. example.com/recipies/soufle.html

But most of the time a broken link is just a frustrating user experience. I'll sometimes put a <del> through it, or leave an <ins> with a note.

Of course, I'm not your boss. Do what's right for your site

[sil@mastodon.social]

@Edent on my blog? no broken links at all! how implausible!
this is, of course, because I'm using @rem's rather cool https://unrot.link/

[edent@mastodon.social]

I now have a page which automatically calculates how bad #linkrot is on my blog.

Link Rot

Terence Eden’s Blog (shkspr.mobi)

[jimniels@mastodon.social]

@Edent very cool!! must. resist. urge. to. do. this. on. my. website…

[christianp@mathstodon.xyz]

@Edent would that graph work better if the broken links went first, so they all have their left edges aligned?

[edent@mastodon.social]

@christianp pull requests welcome
https://gitlab.com/edent/blog-theme/

[cemre@mastodon.social]

@Edent this was a nice read, thanks! It inspired me to think about this problem a bit and i just scribbled this post exploring a possible solution. Its a simple verifiable function defined on the target content. https://mistystep.org/blog/testable-links