Every week I check the links on my other website. And every single week a handful are broken and need fixing or just plain gone.
Link rot - where links no longer point to their original target - is real.
At one point there were 1500 individual web pages on my site and around 6000 links. Today there are around 1000 pages and ~2800 links.
That number drops by a handful each week. This week’s check was exceptionally bad because hundreds of Twitter links stopped working and there is a problem with the web archive.
Integrity, an excellent linking checking program for the Mac, found 493 bad links.
Not all broken
Not every link flagged by Integrity is broken… some were missing temporarily when the bot visited. In other cases the page took too long to load.
While some flagged links are redirects. This week’s 493 bad links only included a single redirect.
It’s good practice to recheck any links Integrity flags… and then manually check before removing a terminally broken link with no obvious alternative.
The web archive is a good source of alternative links. Often a publisher will remove a link, but there’s an archive of the page. Where possible I will link to these.
In recent months, more and more archived pages have been missing in action.
Twitter’s meltdown probably won’t won’t be the last mass-extinction event for web links, but it is a reminder that online history is constantly rewritten, revised and in many cases, deleted.
Attempting to copy 3.7 TB of data over Wi-Fi because I optimistically assumed Wi-Fi 6e could handle the transfer faster than it would take for the MacBook Pro to Ethernet dongle to arrive by courier. It’s like a 21st century tortoise versus hare race.
I used to think those “we have delivered your package” emails and texts from online retailers were a bit weird… after all, most of the time I open the door to the courier…. so I know.
And then we got a delivery of fresh food while out at an appointment and knew to rush home to get it out of the sun rather than meander back via cafe coffee and lunch.
(We live in Auckland so this year we’re talking potential sun, not real sun).
I guess most people living in New Zealand’s North Island now have a much better understanding of why “May you live in interesting times” is a curse.
I haven’t needed to look at the Contacts app on my iPhone for ages. Did just now and it seems every person who has emailed me with a signature including their phone number is now a listed contact. At least 20 per cent are cold callers who I never want to hear from again
I write most of my news stories, features and blog posts using Markdown. If it is a paid job, I convert to .docx or Google Docs format depending on the client. In the past most expected, even demanded, .docx and would struggle with anything else. Nowadays most prefer Docs.
I left the UK 35 years ago to live in New Zealand and still get the occasional urge to have mushy peas with my fish and chips.
The new Micro Blog Mastodon hook up is welcome and I’m definitely going to use it but I think I’ll keep it seperate from my other Mastodon account, I don’t want my clean Micro Blog feed swamped.
Read a post online where someone talks about “your favourite programming languages”.
Made me wonder. Do people actually have favourite programming languages? I guess they do, but I always thought they were just neutral tools, where people use one for this job and another for that job.
I’m not a programmer, but would welcome insight from someone who is.
My brain has been so conditioned by years of watching sport that when I see or hear the name Chelsea, I think of the club. The word “Arsenal” is also, automatically the football club.
Dislike free apps that tell you there are in-app purchases, but don ’t reveal what the purchases are until after you’ve downloaded and installed. In some cases the app can’t function without the purchase. It’s a form of bait and switch.
It never fails to get me that in some cultures a chicken omelette is known as “mother and child reunion”.
Is there a pot of gold at the end of the spectrum or does it only apply to rainbows?
As anyone in New Zealand knows, Auckland had a serious rain storm yesterday. Two people died, two are missing, the main roads and many suburbs flooded.
There’s damage everywhere. My house dodged a bullet. Another 10mm in my storm drain and the downstairs would have been innundated.
More rain fell in ten hours than the city normally gets in an entire summer.
It’s the kind of event where, despite everything, Twitter continues to shine.
I found constant updates and weather information there. Lots of first hand reports, photos and video footage. There were questions and answers. Fast-evolving coverage dominated my Twitter feed. It was what the social media site does best.
Mastodon not so much. In fact not much at all on the accounts I follow. That’s not say there was zero coverage, but it was far from comprehensive. At best it was sporadic. None of the important civil agencies or news media organisations have a Mastodon presence.
Otherwise, there was less material because I’ve carefully honed my Twitter feed over the years and use lists extensively to zoom in on different groups of accounts. I’ve done this with Mastodon, but there are far fewer Aucklanders in my feed. And some that I know are on both sites spent the day, like me, mainly on Twitter.
Mastodon may improve. Twitter may worsen. Yet for now, when there’s a local civil emergency Twitter is the more important channel.
Every single phone notification is turned off, although messages from familiy members (and two important clients) are enabled.
When I switched mobile provider, I deliberately didn’t activate voicemail.
If I’m called from a no-identity number, I rarely answer. It’s different if I’m expecting a call.
There are no social media apps on my phone.
It might not be convenient for other people, but these are my best productivity hacks. I can get so much more done by not being at every bot’s beck and call.
I’m back on the NZ Tech Podcast with Paul Spain discussing technology news with a New Zealand perspective.
Now that I’m learning how to make better use of NetNewsWire, I’m feeding the important Twitter accounts through it so I can spend less time on that site.
It took me a while, well years actually, to cotton-on to using @netnewswire with iCloud, but boy does it make a difference to have everything syncing across the Mac, iPad and iPhone.
Apple’s 10th-generation iPad updates almost every aspect of the tablet. It’s a great device, but its greatness comes with a price increase and a couple of questionable design choices.
Twitter has changed, and not for the better. Killing the links to third-party apps was terrible for me. I used Tweetbot to filter and organise. Without it I could be lost in a soup of distraction.
As a journalist I can’t afford to walk away. Twitter helps me stay in touch with dozens of people and news sources. Mastodon doesn’t come close to replacing that.
Yet I need to prepare for a time when Twitter could become more unbearable, unusable or otherwise too messed around with.
So I’m following key Twitter feeds using my RSS feed reader. I use NetNewsWire: a free app for Macs, iPhones and iPads. In my experience it does a better job than the paid apps, but I open to There are plenty of alternatives to suit everyone’s needs, although not every RSS reader can deal with Twitter feeds.
That way I don’t have to miss anything that happens on Twitter, at the same time I don’t need to waste energy ploughing through the inevitable distractions that Twitter seems intent on making harder to ignore.
I’m interested to hear if other people have new Twitter strategies.
It looks like Twitter has disconnected the third-party clients that we use to help us manage the feed, avoid nastiness and stay in control of the service.
Of course, it could be that something is broken. There has been no communication.
Another possibility is that it has something to do with separating paying from non-paying users.
If the goal is to force people to use the official apps or site and endure ridiculous advertising and general unpleasantness, it could backfire.
Sure, many will take the bait and use the official channels. Many have already and will yet pay up. For others this could be the deal breaking that sends them screaming from the site.
Mattias Ott: “So how about we make 2023 the year of the personal website? The year in which we launch our first site or redesign our old one, publish a little more often, and add RSS and Webmentions to our websites so that we can write posts back and forth.”
It covers most of the bases, but if you find something I’ve missed get in touch.
Going by the marketing and publicity I’ve seen so far, Tesla designed the Cybertruck for environmentally-aware sociopaths.
That’s one hell of a niche market.
I’m looking for a device that I can stick in an old fashioned audio jack that will transmit Bluetooth to my headphones. Is there such a thing? I’ve tried googling the obvious terms, but haven’t seen anything resembling what I’m after. Maybe the obvious terms aren’t the best.
