Over the summer I’ve been fixing the broken links on my other website. There are close to 2000 pages on the site and by the end of November there were around the same number of broken links.

Links break when sites go offline or move pages from one URL to another without a redirect. This is sometimes known as link rot. It has become far more common in recent years. Some weeks the service I use to flag broken links shows as many as dozen either vanish or move. The most I noticed in a single week was 28.

Fixing broken links is tedious and time consuming. Some I just let go and delete the link. OK, I let a lot of them go. If they are easy to repair, I’ll rewrite the link.

So far this summer I’ve repaired or trashed, mainly trashed, about 1400 broken links. The downside of doing this is that twice I have accidentally hit the wrong button and republished the page with the broken link.

My newsletter readers might be wondering what is going on.