Clearing out the linkrot

It stands to reason that a medium as subject to change as the Internet will, over time, exhibit signs of decay.

In the case of a website that amalgamates posts from at least five other sites, and which has been online in one form or another since 2001, this decay manifests itself via linkrot, defined as ‘the process by which hyperlinks on individual websites or the Internet in general tend to point to web pages, servers or other resources that have become permanently unavailable.’

In other words, I’ve spent the past day or three checking, repairing and/or deleting broken links on this site.

The whole exercise makes me feel cleansed, as if I’ve dropped an HTML bath bomb into a gigantic pool of code.

Let’s see how long that feeling lasts.

David Prater
David Prater

David Prater is an Australian-born writer, editor and parent. His interests include mince pies, ice hockey and Joy Division.

View his full biography.

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