Saturday, May 17, 2008

Memo to Entire Blogosphere

Please stop linking to articles on news.yahoo.com. The links always go stale. Link rot across the Web is bad enough as it is, but news.yahoo.com links are guaranteed to return 404 after way too short a time. You know it, I know it, so stop using them as a reference source until Yahoo█ develops a real archive system.

When they do, I will start using the exclamation point again.

That is all.

5 comments:

Adam said...

Zimbabwe's The Herald online has articles go dead in roughly 3-5 days depending on when in the week you link to it, as I found out the hard way when I made a long post about Zimbabwe a couple weeks ago.

I think from their perspective, though, this may be a feature and not a bug, as it allows the government to throw prior statements down the memory hole and come up with a new position not necessarily consistent with that earlier one without having the inaccuracy be so obvious.

Sornie said...

I noticed that issue early on and on the rare occasion I link to something newsy, Yahoo doesn't get my biz.

Alex Williams said...

Brent - You may want to try iterasi. We save the web page, protecting against link rot.

bjkeefe said...

Adam:

I'd like to think Yahoo is a little less sinister in their motivations than a state-run newspaper in a dictatorial country, but I take your point.

Sornie:

Good man. Keep spreading the word.

Alex:

Thanks for the recommendation, but I don't think it helps me if I click on a link that someone else supplied. They would have had to save the news.yahoo.com story themselves.

Adam said...

It says something about my memory that I was the first person to comment on this post and then when you linked to it in the comments on my blog I thought it was a new post until I saw that I had already commented it. Anyways I fixed that particular post by linking to Google's cache of the printer version which I think should stay alive longer than Yahoo's archive although I have not been following this good idea since you posted it so I fear my blog is probably peppered with now dead links to background info on posts that contain mostly opinion (again, my memory for events in my life is for shit which is ironic since my memory for encyclopedic knowledge like the names and functions of proteins down to even what the abbreviations like TNF stand for is highly above the mean just like my dad.)

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