Whose responsibility is it, in the wake of Typepad’s pulling out its own plug any day now, to maintain those links? It is sad, for sure, that they simply issued an ultimatum to all the writers who gave them “content”. Some may well choose to relocate. Many probably will not. And some that ought to know better — looking at you, TED — moved away and left no forwarding address.
Links are the foundation that supports the world wide web, and I take them seriously. I correct broken links when I come across them, archive my own stuff (and support archive.org), and generally try to get to the original behind anything I choose to link to. It isn’t perfect, but it is what it is.
So I used my weak grep-fu to discover that there are links to Typepad in 28 of almost 2000 blog posts on this site. To check them one by one would be quite a lot of effort, first to find the post, then to find the link, then to see if it lives, archive it if it does or search archive.org if it doesn’t, and then amend my link.
I’m wondering whether to just accept that challenge, spend a lot more time automating the process or just, y’know, ignore it.
Webmentions
Webmentions
Webmentions allow conversations across the web, based on a web standard. They are a powerful building block for the decentralized social web.
If you write something on your own site that links to this post, you can send me a Webmention by putting your post's URL in here:
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