Tag Archives: Internet Archive

Dead links

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I started my Daily-Ink blog in China in September 2010, but this name and site came a little later than the original blog. Originally it was created using a blogging platform called Posterous, which you could use via mail. Simply send an email to your personal blog address and it automatically added any pictures, links to videos, and your writing to a post with the email Subject as the title of the blog. Living in a country with a very challenging filter wall, this was a simple way to get a small blog post out without actually having to access a blog or having to upload pictures etc. It was a great tool. But then it died and I just started using WordPress, like I do now. However, I guess I didn’t follow the process to preserve my data and now all the links for images and videos are dead. So this is what my May 2010 archive page looks like.

But it’s not just my blog that’s the issue, it’s the blogs of others as well. The first post seen above, ‘Memorize This’ has links to two other bloggers, Joe Bower and Will Richardson. The link to Joe’s blog just goes to a “HTTP Status: 404 (not found)” page. However the link to Will’s page goes to this:

That is NOT the Will Richardson post I was looking for! I did a search on his updated blog location and found the post, “Is it Really Learning?“. I also went to my post and changed it there so I no longer link to this web-address stealing essay site, instead I link to the correct and intended post.

But realistically, I’m not going to go through my entire blog to do this. Even if I did, I’d probably spend more time trying to replace my own work, and not links to other sites. Because as I shared in my “Goodbye Posterous” post 11 years ago, “I decided to move my little-used Posterous site to this [‘Daily-Ink’] address, as a place to easily upload photos of what I thought would be a daily hand-written journal“, and the only record I seem to have of any of my journal writing is the screen shot I took of my first hand-written daily-ink for that post.

And while I’d love to recover all of these hand-written posts and the videos and pictures that I shared of ‘TIC’ – This is China moments, the reality is that most of them are gone forever.

And that makes me wonder, where will all this go in 20 years? In 50 years? I know I can find my original Pair-a-Dimes blog on the Internet Archive… is that where this blog and my current Pair-a-Dimes blog are destined to go? I guess so. I’ve paid for DavidTruss.com for another decade, but I haven’t paid the web host for that long. How long until this is just a series of dead links? I really haven’t given it too much thought, I just know that for now I plan to keep writing, keep sharing, and keep my links alive a little longer.

Keeper of your digital history

When I lived in China, I had a hard time communicating on any social media. I connected to this blog using Posterous, which let me post easily from an App on my phone, before WordPress had an App. When Posterous went defunct all the images I posted through their App were not saved on WordPress and so those images were lost. So I have old posts like this, where I only have a dead link where a photo used to be:

This isn’t the only social media company that has gone defunct, taking the history of my work with it. I loved using the Ning Network communites like Classroom 2.0, I had a student project with over a 100,000 visits on Wikispaces, this video had close to 100,000 views on BlipTV, and I had great conversations archived on coComment. My original blog was on ELGG, where I had a great community of bloggers to learn from, then it switched to Eduspaces which was less friendly and forced me to do the smart thing and self-host on DavidTruss.com. Delicious, Diigo, and Scribed were communities but now they’ve changed and are just ‘places’ that I used to visit and use. And there are plenty of other tools that have come and gone and when they are gone, so is a record of everything I did in those spaces.

One social media tool that I have used more than any other is Twitter. I was such a fan, I even wrote an ebook about how to get started on Twitter, then gave it away for free. I have Tweeted 33,800+ times since I started Twitter in 2007. Today I decided to request an archive of all my tweets.

I’ve lost too many great conversations and archives of data because of social media services either transforming to something different, suddenly requiring fees that are beyond what I’m willing to pay, or just going defunct… and with so much happening to Twitter right now, I just figured I’d request my data and store it myself for safe keeping. If anything happens to Twitter, I want a record of what I did in this social media space. I’m not predicting that Twitter will go the way of the dodo bird, but I’m just not confident it will look the same at the end of 2023, now that it is privately owned and operated. I want a backup of my data… just in case.

Documenting your life

It occurred to me last night that a daily blog is an interesting way to document your life. It’s not a true journal, like a diary, because there are things I won’t share because it’s public… However it is a document of my thoughts and it opens a door into the things I think about.

I’m basically at a point now where I look back at old posts and some I remember writing and some I don’t. The blog is documenting thoughts I don’t even remember having. Have you ever looked back at a piece of writing and not remembered writing it? It’s kind of a weird feeling.

Kids today are doing this in different ways. They are sharing videos on TikTok, photos on Instagram, and even memories on Snapchat. Yes, even on Snapchat, the app where everything disappears, there is an option to save your video and Snapchat will share your ‘memories’ with you each year, like us old folk see on Facebook.

We are documenting our lives in digital, social spaces. Some of these spaces will disappear over time, and we will lose a piece of our histories. I no longer have my Ning and my Wikispaces memories archived, I can’t even remember some of the names of the apps that I stored memories on, that no longer exist.

But some will survive, some will get archived. While a paper journal can disappear, digital footprints might stick around for a very long time.