In the general spirit of tidying up before the Christmas/New Year period I used a link checker on my blog (Integrity on the Mac, I’ve also used Xenu on Windows). And discovered a bunch of 404s. Some were to sites that still exist but either reorganized without setting up 301 redirects, or deleted the content I linked to. Some were to sites that don’t exist any more. I guess part of the price I pay for being part of the spidernet that is the web is making sure my little bit of it is reasonably tidy, so I’ll be deleting dead links (though not content) over the next little while. This does raise the issue of the content in cases where I may have referred to, say, a business that doesn’t exist any more. I’m thinking I’ll make a small note in cases where it seems to matter, with the determination of “seems to matter” being somewhat arbitrary.
I installed and activated the WP Minor Edit plugin for WordPress and will mark all these changes as minor, so this shouldn’t lead to the Atom feed being discombobulated.
Wow, I’ve run Xenu (running in Wine on Ubuntu!) against my blog and other work sites, but mostly to check the integrity of internal facing links (which I have much more control over). Given that a large part of my blog is a linkblog, I can’t imagine going through and updating dead external links.
That said, one thing I’ve realized is that even dead links contain interesting information. The domain, pathing, and especially the filename/permalinks are great hints as to what used to be there, almost like grave rubbings. I wouldn’t want to remove the links for fear that I would lose that information. Super useful if you ever need to go Wayback Machine-diving.