One of the things I hate most on the internet, and part of the reason I started WordPress, was to fight linkrot. Ever since 1998, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote “Cool URIs Don’t Change,” I’ve been obsessed with content management and ensuring that links don’t break. (BTW, TBL, a pioneer of creating the World Wide Web, has a great new profile out in the New Yorker.)
I learned today from the Newspack newsletter that the Houston Press is now on WordPress. Newspack is a distribution or bundle of WordPress designed for journalism, and it is led by Kinsey Wilson, who began his career as a night-shift journalist covering cops for a newspaper in Chicago, went on to have top editorial and business positions at The New York Times, NPR, and USA TODAY, and ran WordPress.com for a few years, which gives him a very unique position to help craft WordPress for journalists and publishers.
The Houston Press is an alt-weekly that wrote the very first profile of me in the world, which I blogged about here. There’s a funny quote in there:
He recently considered taking a job with a San Francisco search-engine start-up, but ended up turning them down. “They have a ton of money…But it would be 50- or 60- or 70-hour weeks, a lot of work, and I wouldn’t have time” to do WordPress.
That “search-engine start-up” was Google! How the internet might have turned out differently if I had taken that job, as my Mom wanted me to (because they offered free food). I still think Google is one of the most interesting companies in the world, one of the few places I’d consider working if I weren’t running Automattic.
Back to linkrot, the original link to the profile in that article was http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2004-10-28/feature2.html, which this morning didn’t work, but thanks to the Houston Press being on Newspack/WordPress I was able to ping Kinsey and his colleague Jason Lee was able to fix it so it redirects to the new canonical URL for that content in minutes. A little corner of the internet tidied up! I love the Wayback Machine, but not needing it is even better.
Alas, I miss that food a lot! Though my waistline now is better off without it
I’ve been blogging for a long time now, so link rot is inevitable. When this happens, and a link is simply not available (rather than having moved), but is important to the post it’s part of, what’s your personal preference for how to deal with it? My own is to preserve the page, remove the link and add a note to add context to the missing link.
Some of my posts that quality, though, are pretty low quality, so I’m always split over the preserving/deleting part of how to deal with them.
Really loved this post, Matt. Linkrot is one of those quiet problems that chips away at the web’s collective memory, and it’s inspiring to see how WordPress and Newspack are actively fighting it. The fact that a 2004 link could be restored in minutes perfectly captures why open publishing and long-term stewardship of content matter so much.
Also fascinating to imagine an alternate reality where you joined Google the web would have been a very different place!
Linkrot… if only normal domain names and hosting could be bought for life and never need to be renewed. If only web 3 domains could work with dynamic content cms & mysql and not cost gas to make changes to the content. If only the web were distributed on a peer to peer mesh network where all connected machines stored a small part of the web so no centralized web hosting were needed. If only i could get a block of static IP addresses from my 5G Cell router at home so I could run my own web server. So it goes the way of the wayback machine to keep our content forever accessible.