Yesterday after work, I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole. Apparently my ‘Subscribe by email’ button isn’t working on my blog and a relative asked me to add her to my subscriptions because hers was broken, and she was no longer receiving blog updates from me. I spent a bit of time looking at it, but even with AI help, I think I need to add a plugin to fix it and the first one I tried had an expensive subscription that I didn’t want to sign up for. After playing around for a bit, and then moving all my old ‘Pair-a-Dimes’ subscribers to Daily-Ink, (not fully realizing what I was doing), I decided to hold off on any more tinkering with subscriptions.

However, now I was on the back end of my blog and I realized that a post I was looking at had a related post with a broken image. So I clicked on the post, ‘Alan November: “Do learning”‘, and discovered that the image, probably a screen shot of a Tweet, was the point of the entire post, and I don’t have a back-up of it. It was an Alan November tweet, so I thought I’d go to X.com and find it, but Alan deleted his account and so now I have no idea how to fix this?  Essentially, the post is meaningless now, and there’s nothing I can do about it. That said, I will dig up my old laptop and see if I have it saved there as a last resort.

This happened because I used a proxy website, Posterous -now defunct, to be able to blog from my phone when I lived in China. However, as I meandered around my Daily-Ink blog I also found additional broken links. I was able to update 2 videos that were no longer available, with the same video at a different link. I also found references to other people’s blogs and those links are no longer working. I can’t do anything about this. Then I realized that I have shared a bunch of links with different link shorteners that are defunct. One of those is tr.im, which is also in a few of my old presentations. And there are a bunch of links across my blog where I used my own link shortener 2di.me (from my ‘Pair-a-Dimes’ blog days). I still pay to use this domain, but at $40 a year, just to maintain old links, it seems like a waste of money. But before I give it up, I think I’m going to do my best to find these links and update them with the full URL. That will take hours of time, but I have a plan to do it in the next year.

I don’t know when I’ll eventually give up my blogs and let them go the way of the dinosaur, but even these posts will disappear one day. What I’m surprised about is how many links to blogs I’ve referenced are already gone. Bloggers I admired and respected have let their blogs go, links to them just hit ‘404 – Not Found’ pages. Sometimes these links and broken images are not essential to the message I’m sharing, but other times what I shared loses its meaning without them.

It’s sad, but also not really worth worrying about. With over 2,500 posts now, all the broken links probably don’t add up to 2% of these, and in all honesty, nobody is seeking out Daily-Ink posts from over a decade ago. I’ll update what I can as a labour of love… and keep blogging. This too shall pass, but not yet. To misquote one of my favourite poems, ‘there’s miles to go before my blog sleeps’.

So, as a final thought, to those that subscribe, read on social media, and meander here occasionally, thank you for finding your way to my writing. I’ll do my best to keep this space tidy, with live links, and working images.