Older blog posts
March 16, 2009
Having occasion to check back on some older posts Adam noticed that the hyperlinks no longer function in a number of instances.
He supposes that this is inevitable . One of the most obvious instances is in the case of links to material that was on the Stuff web-site. Particularly some blog posts by Espiner, Hickey et al and older cartoons from their team of cartoonists.
Has anyone else noticed this?
Is it just a fact of blog life?
Are there ways of obviating this problem?
Tried looking via Google cache, but that did not appear to help. So much for everything remaining somewhere on the web. Unless of course his approach to finding a cache or other copy was in correct.
Is there a way of taking a backup so to speak?
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4 Comments
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I now save most graphics. Think I may start storing article text on the major posts and or ‘printing the posts’ to file.
Fact of blogging
YouTube vids get pulled, images move or are deleted, links die. One way around this is to screen grab important stories a la Tumeke.
My links to Stuff have all survived (back to August 2008, when I started blogging), but the are all redirecting to new addresses. It may be that they have decided not to redirect anything earlier than a certain date.
The only way you can be certain that you will always have the links is to download the page to your site and link to that. I do this for graphics, but not articles. I suspect you have limited space on WordPress.com and will run out of allocated space fairly quickly.
Nearly as good as this, however, is the plug-in absolute links. This will change your permalinks to relative links, meaning that when somone moves and updates a document, the link will follow it. It won’t help you to find the old broken links and it won’t help if a document is simply deleted, but it’s not bad.
Adam,
It could very well be limited to the stuff website. After they overhauled their site, I lost my RSS feed (and, strangely enough, while I haven’t bothered to switch their new feed to my reader, I don’t find myself missing it), and you may simply have lost those links in the swap.
Of course, I don’t actually know (and am no IT guru), but it almost makes sense…. maybe someone more knowledgeable could confirm or deny?
PB.