So I have just spidered my site and, oh man, I have a lot of dead links. One of the drawbacks to using your web log as a hot link list is that a lot of stuff dies or gets lost as the web shifts around. It was especially brutal to remove all the New York Times and Technology Review links. I have to massively edit my old content just remove those links and still have entries make sense.
So I’ve learned some lessons:
- Don’t link to the NYT or TechReview ever again. Actually I stopped doing this months ago when they started forcing us to register to see old content. Stupid. Old media is stupid. I’d figure since TechReview is a magazine from MIT, they’d be smarter than this but oh well.
- Stop using my log as a link lister. It’s boring and these links can be found on zillions of other web logs.
- Put more of my own content on my own site
- Only link to things that are at the domain level. Sites may reorganize constantly but hopefully the big domains won’t disappear.
- Spider my site more often to reduce the load of removing or changing dead links.