You're probably not that observant or as anal as I am, so I'm going to point out that I've spent a day cleaning up old blog posts. Basically, I went through the two-hundred-and-thirty-odd posts from 2003 and either applied labels to ones that passed my rigorous standards or deleted the rest. In the end I deleted about 80 posts mostly because of dead links.
In of itself, dead links are to be expected over time. (Ironically, my techical advice to people at work is to avoid linking documents because "links are made to be broken".) The problem comes when your entire post consists of: "Hey, look at this guy! I can't believe he did that!" or "I complete disagree with this position because of the following reasons..." If the links go bad, your posts ceases to make sense and therefore, in my estimation, can be ELIMINATED. In the process of the cleaning, I noticed that ESPN, BBC, Cinescape/Mania, Amazon, and the NY Times have held up good, while MSN and MSNBC, CNN, Washington Post and many many others didn't get their archiving together for some time, if they ever have. The lesson for me is to always include segments of the linked material in your post, in case the source decides to move.
And, I realize that going through two hundred posts from five years ago is a colossal waste of time, but it is my own special way of protesting my lucrative yet insanely boring and unrewarding job these days. It could always be much much worse, but mental flacidity is its own demon.
1 comment:
"mental flacidity". wow, that's a good one.
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