11–20 of 335 posts
Linkrot is a real problem. Especially for those sites that disappear before the archive can get to them. On another note, the more dynamic the web becomes the harder it will be to archive so if you think that the 1994 content is a problem wait until you live in 2040 and you want to read some pages from 2017.
Man, I really miss FTP. I remember when you would just FTP to the site you were using and grab a binary from their /pub/. Mirrors were plentiful, and FXP could distribute files without needing a shell on a file server.
Also, consider that right-click save as works the vast majority of the time and the exceptions are for content which simply wouldn't be available (e.g. video streams) for direct download due to IP concerns.
I mean, this isn't all that surprising. Not unlike buying a twenty-year-old visitor's guide to a city and finding that a number of the shops and restaurants have closed, the stadiums have different names, etc.
People tend to think that our society is very well documented but if you look at what is left of old societies it is usually whatever was engraved in stone or if you're lucky what remained on paper. With the internet replacing most or even all of the paper storage in the short term it is true (besides our present day paper not being acid free to last long enough anyway), we are better documented than ever. But in the longer term it may be a huge gaping hole in history.
And that's different than cities changing at their regular pace and books becoming less dated. It's like the visitor guide itself is no longer readable and therefore you won't even know what was there in the past.
I had to end up creating a link component that would automatically link to an archive.org version of the link on every URL if I marked as "dead". It was so prevalent it had to be automated like that.
Another reason why I've been contributing $100/year to the Internet Archive for the past 3 years and will continue to do so. They're doing some often unsung but important work.
I mean, this isn't all that surprising. Not unlike buying a twenty-year-old visitor's guide to a city and finding that a number of the shops and restaurants have closed, the stadiums have different names, etc.
Man, I really miss FTP. I remember when you would just FTP to the site you were using and grab a binary from their /pub/. Mirrors were plentiful, and FXP could distribute files without needing a shell on a file server.
I've had a similar problem. In updating my portfolio site recently, I noticed a vast majority of links were dead. Not just live projects published maybe 3 years or more ago (I expect those to die). But also links to articles and mentions from barely one year ago, or links to award sites, and the like. With a site listing projects going back ~15 years, one can imagine how bad things were. I had to end up creating a li…
A similarly really annoying thing is when you find old technet articles, stack overflow questions, or blog posts that seem potentially really useful, but that have broken images, broken links, etc... so the content (possibly extremely useful at the time) is completely useless now. It really stresses the importance of directly quoting / paraphrasing the content you want in your plain text, and not relying on external…
Wikipedia also hit pretty hard by link rot, nice thing there at least is that volunteers can try to fix it
> The average lifespan of a web page is 100 days. Remember GeoCities? The web doesn't anymore. It's not good enough for the primary medium of our era to be so fragile.
> IPFS provides historic versioning (like git) and makes it simple to set up resilient networks for mirroring of data.