Tending To My Digital Garden
blogging · 4 comments · 200 words · read ~207 times.
I've written over 3,000 blog posts throughout the years. This blog has become a repository of my thoughts, feelings, experiments, hopes, and creations.
It has also become outdated, buggy, and suffers from link-rot.
So, every day, I tend to my digital garden. I go in to old posts and check that the links are still pointing somewhere relevant. Are the embeds still live or do they need replacing? Has my writing somehow been mangled by me buggering about with CSS?
Oh, I could use automated tools. But when a spammer takes over a domain I've linked to, they rarely send an HTTP 410 code.
Sometimes the work is delightful - finding a prescient post from a decade ago. Sometimes it is frustrating - being unable to find a vital-but-long-dead link. And sometimes it is sad - seeing how much or how little the world has changed.
But, mostly, it is meditative. We do our best to fight against decay, but entropy always wins in the end. Every link eventually withers and every truth is eroded by time. Nevertheless, we continue.
Nice - I should do this to my own site. Some years ago I pitched the idea of a daily outbound link site wide checker to inform the user if the endpoint had changed in any way. Wish I had the chops to build it myself back then. Came about because a Honk Kong Bank, I worked for the parent company, had a link to a domain that had expired and was taken over by a porn site and the first people to notice were some Hong Kong Journos - massive embarrassing story in HK. No one was interested though.
Maybe you'd like to archive your bookmarks and links? I recently launched archivebox and pointed it my RSS.
@blog
thank you for sharing. perused your blog and read a couple of book reviews and rabbit holed 🖖🏾
@Edent This is RTMI, I just updated an FAQ on my website that hadn't been touched in 20 years!
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