The Trials and Tribulations of Link Rot
Please congratulate me. I’ve just finished digging up loads of blog posts I wrote for a few art publications over the years to refer to from here, my Medium blog. A few of these publications have gone through several redesigns since they published my writings. I’d saved links to all these writings, but after all the redesigns, those old links I’d so carefully saved no longer exist. My published writing had been moved or removed. I can repost all the things I wrote here, but then I lose the clout of having been published by someone else. I want to point to them to show the world that people have hired me to write.
In the archives world, we call these broken hyperlinks “link rot.” If you’ve ever clicked a hyperlink and your browser has loaded a web page with “404 page not found” on it, you’ve experienced it, and know its woes.
Thankfully, the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine has come to our rescue. All my published work is not only in the IA’s stores, but it saved pages on multiple dates over time, so I can link to my writings from before the blog’s sidebar was changed to something less aesthetically pleasing, or before the page got hacked.
The importance of archiving websites is higher than you might assume. Government websites, for example, which contain data that strongly influence political leanings, such as the U.S. Environmental Agency, are often altered when new presidents take office. All presidents do this, including our current 45:
No matter what your political views might be, it’s important to retain the access to the marks that each presidential administration leaves.
Link rot ruins the flow that embedded linked references offer any reader. Big publications, such as the New York Times, are aware of these issues, but smaller ones are not. Consider the devastating occurrence in 2017 when New York web publications, DNAInfo and Gothamist, were suddenly shut down {archived} because their owner didn’t feel their unionizing was financially viable for the publications growth. Articles published by these news sources had been linked to or referred to by hundreds of other publications. These hyperlinks now lead to 404 pages even though the publications have since been resurrected.
The process of grabbing archival URLs to avoid link rot can slow down a workflow. It’s annoying. But if what gets published is not part of a major publication that can afford to archive all it publishes online, be sure that you may lose access to your work at some point in time.
With all this in mind, anything I publish here that links to a website will first link to the original URL as I found it, and will be followed by another archival link in curly brackets. I’ll be using the Internet Archive along with Perma.cc {archived} and Webrecorder {archived}. With any luck, my work and the things I’ve been connected with will be saved for, at the very least, my own enjoyment in the years to come.
