Recently I got a message letting me know one of the links on my /links page had gone dead. This time I was able to find a copy of the page in the Internet Archive and fix it up.
And then I started thinking.
There are going to be more dead links in my bookmarks. There probably are already. How am I going to deal with that? I am certainly not expecting to get an email every time somebody comes across one. So I thought about automating it.
It starts simple. Taking a list of urls and checking which do not work anymore is an easy piece of code to write. In fact, I already have some code running to check all the links in my posts for webmentions , it would not be too much work to extend it to also report on any dead links.
But here’s a secret about programming. Often the actual tasks a program needs to do are very simple. The challenge is in the “plumbing.” Getting a piece of information from where it is obtained to where it needs to be used can be very complex. Especially if there are existing systems already in place.
That is the case with this website. The code I am talking about runs on the same computer that runs this website. But the files and static site generator I use to create this website live on a different computer. So it will take work to get the list of broken links to the right computer. And once it is there—then what?
I was jolted out of thinking about how to automatically check for broken links by the thought of what to actually do about them. Yes, I could just delete them, but do I want to do that? I save these links on my site because I think there’s something interesting in them. It seems a shame to just pretend that they never existed.
I like history, especially ancient history. I took a couple of classes in college, though not as many as I would have liked. There are so many things that have not survived, and that we only know about because they were mentioned, quoted, or cited by something else. I can’t help but think of that.
The internet archive has an API for checking if it has a page saved . I could use that to update links. I might do just that. But it won’t have everything.
Broken links are inevitable. They are part of life on the internet. Maybe the most honest (and, conveniently laziest) thing to do is to just let them break, let them go. Someday this website will go down too. I hope not for a long time, but that isn’t always up to us.
All that being said, if you do find a broken link on my site, please do let me know. I’ll see what I can do to fix it. Conversely, if I have an archive link to something of yours and you don’t want me to, also let me know; I’ll take it down.