Bill Bennett
Something else rotten on the Internet
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.
We survived Auckland’s atmospheric river and Cyclone Gabrielle, only to be flooded by a ridiculous amount of rain that came down over North Auckland in about 30 minutes this afternoon.
Couriers....
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
Put my AI-generated Studio Ghibli “working and studying from home” artwork as the main splash image on my work technology-related website.
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.
My great grandmother, who was around until I was a teenager, believed sending rockets into space messed up the weather.
What if she was right?
(if I didn’t put this disclaimer here, people might think I’m being serious).
My great grandmother, who was around until I was a teenager, believed sending rockets into space messed up the weather.
What if she was right?
(If I didn’t put this disclaimer here, people might think I’m being serious).
Absolutely love it that Safari offers Yahoo as a search engine option. Surely Apple is having a joke here. Does anybody pick it?
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 cyclone forming north of New Zealand is starting to look chewy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f79wkAiQ3n0&feature=youtu.be
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.
Love how when I write a news story on my one-person site, Bing sees it as news. Dislike Google’s approach which rules out a one person site ever being newsworthy, although some favoured folk get past that doorkeeper.
Published the full text of my latest newsletter on Linkedin and Medium to test whether they can replace the traffic lost since Twitter came under new management.
SInce October the Twitter traffic to my site is down more than 50 per cent.
Also interested to see how these links fare in Google search compared with the original link. Duck Duck Go search is especially poor with results for my site so I’ll watch that too. Anyone interested in a report back?
Original post is at billbennett.co.nz/spark-joi…
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.
Found a few more entries for my New Zealand media on Mastodon directory. It still looks light. Know of any other NZ media folk with Mastodon accounts? Please get in touch.
It never fails to get me that in some cultures a chicken omelette is known as “mother and child reunion”.
Last night I watched the Tom Hanks movie Greyhound on Apple TV. It was about a WW2 destroyer protecting merchant ships from U-boats on the North Atlantic run.
As the high winds and rain lashed the on screen ship, I was thinking at least in the Auckland storm we didn’t have to deal with ice on the windows and torpedoes.