I’ve redone the permalink structure on this site. It’s not something I really want to do often — they’re called permalinks for a reason — but it was time to clean it up. Redirects are in place to keep old links working. Continue reading
Tag: linkrot
Best Way to Label Dead Links
I use the Broken Link Checker plugin on this blog and on Speed Force to find broken or moved links. In addition to helping you manage them in the admin interface, it can also assign formatting (as a CSS class) to mark them in your posts.
Cool! Readers can see that the link is broken before clicking on it!
But what’s the best way to label the links?
The plugin uses strike-through by default. You are marking something that’s gone, but strike-through usually means the text is being crossed out. That’s fine for a link in a list, but something like “Catering was provided by MyNiftyFoodCo” implies that the name of the company is wrong, not that the website is gone.
Just making something italic or changing the color doesn’t work either, because it’s arbitrary. Nothing about an italic link (which could be a title), or a random other color, suggests that something might be missing.
What I’ve come up with is to reduce the contrast on broken links. It combines two familiar schemes:
- High contrast for new links and low contrast for visited links.
- “Graying out” inactive items in software.
So here, I’ve got bright blue for new links, darker blue for visited links, and broken links as black (well, very dark gray), the same color as surrounding text. I’m keeping the underline in place so there’s still some indication that it’s a link, but it’s not as strong as the label for one that’s still functional.
It’s still not ideal, since color is the only difference, but it should cause less confusion than the strike-through.
Dead Link Distraction
All the things I’d planned or wanted to do tonight, and what do I end up staying up past midnight on? Cleaning out dead links.
Links: Fonts, Headline Tips & Geocities Backup
- Up way too late browsing 1001freefonts.com (It’s exactly what it says on the tin. Give or take.)
- Best headlines: learn from the BBC.
- Ambitious, crazy, or both? Backing up Geocities: Lessons so far.
Web Contest: 11 Years Later
While checking some dead links in the Internet Archive, I decided to see what they had of the website for the Literary Guild at UCI. This was a creative writing club we were both involved in back in college. There’s an abbreviated history of the club still online.
I looked at the earliest archived copy I could find, and noticed down in the corner a badge for a long-forgotten website contest. Every quarter, the UCI Bookstore holds a literary contest, sometimes poetry, sometimes short stories. In spring 1996, they decided to make it a website contest. I had just built a website for the club, and submitted it. Our site was one of the three winners [archive.org].*
Just for kicks, I decided to see which of the sites were still around.
- Literary Guild at UCI – gone. The club disbanded after the 2000 school year, and the defunct website was removed 2 years later. I still keep an archive of one segment, the collaborative writing projects, but it used to have 10 times as much writing, meeting minutes, club info and news, etc.
- The Orchid Weblopedia – gone. It appears to have moved around a bit for several years, but the top search result for the title brings up its last web designer, and a note saying that “this page no longer exists.”
- Ishmael’s Companion – the study guide for the book, Ishmael is still around, but it’s now a tiny part of author Daniel Quinn’s site.
1 out of 3. And even that one’s at a different location.
And so the link rot continues…
* I was hoping to link to an independent announcement, but the UCI Bookstore website only lists the most recent winners (Spring 2007), and while the Anteater Weekly regularly announced the winners, their archives only go back to 1997. I did find the announcement in the May 30, 1996 Zotmail Archive, but it doesn’t return linkable results, so you’ll have to search for it.