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I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

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Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#281

Post by D-Coder »

mfoy_ wrote: post #5

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…

I'm reading Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog articles from 2006. Most of the links that I try (75%?) are dead.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#282

Post by c22 »

Sleeep wrote: post #179
c22 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one I hate is when I find old forum posts explaining how to do something in the physical world and all the embedded photos are broken. Not because the image host went out of business or the user deleted them, but just because they didn't log in for a year and the host deactivated their account. This is why whenever I link a photo I upload it to my own server and I never change the URL.

I apologize in advance as there's no non-morbid way to ask this but... what happens to the images on your server if you die tomorrow? It would be exactly the same situation, right? They would exist until your bill is due in a couple years then your account will be deactivated and your images will linkrot.

I have the server paid up for 10 years and the domain for 15. But it's true, eventually all things must end. I do have credentials for all the things written into my will so I guess it ultimately depends on how much my children care about preserving my helpful forum posts.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#283

Post by sdrothrock »

koz1000 wrote: post #149
ChrisSD wrote: post #39

Related to this, I had trouble finding examples of pre 1996 web design. The internet archive has a lot from 1997 onwards. The oldest live examples of sites from that era, that I know of are: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/T... http://oreilly.com/gnn/gnnhome.html http://www.trincoll.edu/zines/tj/tj12.02.93/tjcontents.html The BBC also donated its Networking Club to the Internet Archive: htt…

You could try my site for Pinball Expo 1994. http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/ Did it by hand with MS Notepad, MS Paint, Apple QuickTake 100 camera, Chameleon TCP/IP, and Mosaic for PC. I did, however, drop the webmaster email address about 20 years ago.

Lysator is incredibly nostalgic for me; when I was just starting on the internet around 1994-1995, a lot of my favorite websites were on lysator, including the gigantic Wheel of Time Index.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#284

Post by dajohnson89 »

whitef0x wrote: post #230
vxNsr wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is terrific, I wanna add this as a ddg bang...

Just filled out ddg's suggestion form to add this as a bang. I'll let you know if it goes live.

This is awesome, never knew about this feature. I may have to give ddg another shot.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#285

Post by mulmen »

JCharante wrote: post #279
mulmen wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent is expensive in my city, do you think it is reasonable to tell someone who can't afford rent to just buy their own building? That's what you are suggesting.

You're not going to be in the Alexa top 10,000. Go run a docker container for $3/month to host your site, cache it with cloudflare's free plan and pay $12/year for a domain. Its only $48/yr to host all your content. It's really not that ridiculous.

It is ridiculous because time is scarce. We have to decide how to spend our time. That doesn't mean we have to shut up and accept everything else.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#286

Post by beezle »

hawski wrote: post #151
addicted wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it richer and deeper now? Maybe at the fringes, but I feel that the internet today, with my emphasis being on the "inter" (different) "net" (networks) part of it, is far less deeper or richer than before. What we basically have reduced to are a bunch of siloed netowrks such as Facebook. When I searched for something when Google first came out I got a mix of results from a variety of sites I had never heard about.…

I'm beginning to think that there is a niche for a peculiar kind of a search engine. A search engine for static almost-none to none JavaScript pages. It would penalize pages for ad-network usage. I would really like to not have in search results most sites that try to monetize on my attention. I want raw facts and opinions. No click-bait to grab my attention or feed my internal cave man with rage. No ad-networks or d…

Well, there was Yanoff's list which was pretty great. I think 94 was around the time I stopped having to remember a lot of IP addresses.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#287

Post by exikyut »

jake-low wrote: post #79
tonto wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia also hit pretty hard by link rot, nice thing there at least is that volunteers can try to fix it

For anyone curious, you can help fix dead reference links on Wikipedia in just a few seconds. If you find a page that has a dead link (or several), click the "View History" tab at the top, then click "Fix Dead Links" to run the InternetArchiveBot on the page. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Link_rot

Genuine question. Why isn't this done automatically? Astronomical (even suspicious) amounts of continuous outgoing bandwidth?

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#288

Post by no_news_is »

cheapsteak wrote: post #124
whatever_dude wrote: post #15

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…

For portfolios, you should really also look into https://webrecorder.io/ It's _not_ a video recording service. It saves and can replay all network requests during a session (including authenticated requests). It's open source, you can self host, I'm not affiliated even though I'm very happy that it exists

Thanks for mentioning this site. I've done this with mitmproxy but it's complicated, and this was super easy -- I could recommend to anyone.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#289

Post by kwhitefoot »

JCharante wrote: post #279
mulmen wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent is expensive in my city, do you think it is reasonable to tell someone who can't afford rent to just buy their own building? That's what you are suggesting.

You're not going to be in the Alexa top 10,000. Go run a docker container for $3/month to host your site, cache it with cloudflare's free plan and pay $12/year for a domain. Its only $48/yr to host all your content. It's really not that ridiculous.

For the kind of static content we seem to be talking about you can use https://neocities.org/.

No need to spend any money.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#290

Post by ernsheong »

nebabyte wrote: post #269
ernsheong wrote: post #259

I'm working on https://www.pagedash.com , sort of a personal web archive. Hope it helps people like journalists or authors to keep links alive with their original content, even if the original website goes down.

Sounds like pinboard.io

Difference is that PageDash can archive pages that require authentication because it uses a browser extension to retrieve page assets (it doesn't just delegate the work to a server to do the crawling). It also can grab stuff within iframes. Basically the main feature is "archive the page exactly as you saw it".
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