Link rot.
Monday, 8 April 2019
65% of all external links on my site here have become dead or outdated over the recent years. I recovered some of them, but not all, sorry.
The web is made of links. That's the whole point of this wonderful thing. A "web" of connected sites. Places of information. The hyper-link is what made the web. Sure, you need the connections, the wires, the servers and the protocols to get this idea to work - but the glue between all this are the links, and their URLs.
Why am I writing this? Because a whooping 65% of the links on my site here are either "dead" -- the URLs where once the linked content have been removed, the domains deleteted or else -- or the links have changed, because the linked website has undergone a redesign, a change of their content structure and they forgot about their old URLs. This is the case for almst every link I ever placed to fender.com, esp. the links to the different guitar models over the time. They all now redirect to the Fender homepage, not to the model page. I am sorry for that, but there is nothing I can do but to change the link when I discover that it has once again changed.
I spent the better portion of yesterday to check the links on my site, and try to research, where the linked contents now may be found. Several old links are gone for good, but thankfully the web archive (archive.org) has the "way back machine" and has indexed some of the old contents, and now I link to those URLs.
Some of Fender's links, esp. for set up guides and serial numbers, I updated to their current location, but I fear that with the next redesign of their site the links will be outdated once again.
