Continuing to bring in old posts on the day (roughly) they were written, today's effort — Eat the Riches — brought to light an aspect of link rot that is always a bit of a surprise.
The piece hinged on links to two news sites, Fox News and the International Herald Tribune as was, now the NYT. Neither link remained, and neither had been captured by the Internet Archive. I managed to find a substitute: Feeding Time: Zoo Employees Killed Animals and Sold the Meat, but when I went to preserve it, the Internet Archive could not get beyond the page from Der Spiegel asking you to pay or suffer ads. (Luckily it had already been captured.)
There were three other dead links, but this time they had been saved and so I have adjusted the links to point to them as seen on the date nearest the original post.
To be clear, it is sad when a personal website dies or moves and its content becomes unavailable; mitigating that sadness is what my effort to bring in old posts here is about. But when the website belongs to an organisation that presumably has coders and professionals at its disposal, I do think it should be possible to maintain old links or at least redirect them appropriately.
Two ways to respond: webmentions and comments
Webmentions
Webmentions allow conversations across the web, based on a web standard. They are a powerful building block for the decentralized social web.
“Ordinary” comments