MaisonBisson.com » link rot

Too Bad The Hanzo Archives Wordpress Plugin Is Caput

Casey Bisson — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:12:46 +0000

The Hanzo Archives Wordpress plugin is something I’d be very excited to use. Ironically, it’s disappeared from the web (though the blog post hasn’t):

We’ve released a Wordpress Plugin which automatically archives anything you link to in your blog posts; it also adds a ‘perma-permalink’ for the archived version adjacent to each original link.

An Amazon Web Services case study put me on to Hanzo a while ago, and in May 2008 I actually spoke with Mark Middleton (the markm who posted the entry above). Mark revealed that community take-up on the plugin and other general purpose web archiving services was below expectations. The company has since refocused on legal matters (even their blog tag-line has changed to “web archiving for compliance and e-discovery”).

I wonder if, now that the number of people and companies that have been blogging for years has grown, there might be more of a market for such a service.

Detecting Broken Images in JavaScript

Casey Bisson — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:45:49 +0000

We’ve become accustomed to link rot and broken images in nearly all corners of the web, but is there a way to keep things a bit cleaner?

K.T. Lam of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology came up with this sweet trick using jQuery and readyState to find and replace broken images:

jQuery('span#gbs_'+info.bib_key).parents('ul').find('img.bookjacket[@readyState*="uninitialized"]').replaceWith('+info.thumbnail_url+'" alt="'+strTitle+'" height="140" width="88" />');

And it works really well, but only in IE. Testing for img.complete or img.naturalWidth might be possibilities, but I’m much more interested in the onerror property of the img tag:

<img src="picture1.gif" onerror="this.onerror=null;this.src='missing.gif';"/>

Or in JS:

var imgsrc = 'picture1.gif';
var img = new Image();
 
img.onerror = function (evt){
	alert(this.src + " can't be loaded.");
}
img.onload = function (evt){
	alert(this.src + " is loaded.");
}
 
img.src = imgsrc;

Or call a JS function when the browser detects a broken image:

<html>
<head>
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
function ImgError(source){
	source.src = "/images/noimage.gif";
	source.onerror = "";
	return true;
}
script>
head>
 
<body>
<div><img src="http://jquery.com/images/bibeault_cover150A.jpg"
border="1" height="100" alt="image" onerror="ImgError(this)" />div>
body>
html>

I haven’t tested any of this code, but it’s just a matter of time.

Linkrot? We Don’t Have Any Steenking Linkrot!

Casey Bisson — Tue, 02 May 2006 18:42:17 +0000

Allen asked, via the web4lib list:

I’m interested in how others handle linkrot in library blogs. Do you fix broken links? Remove them if they can’t be fixed? Do nothing?

Michael answered:

I deal with link rot on blogs as I would with any other publication, print or otherwise: do nothing. The post is dated and users should be aware that links from two years ago may no longer work.

We need to understand that the web is a living, breathing, and sometimes dying organism. The forrest will renew itself.

Dropping the metaphor, link rot is frustrating, but deleting links is deleting history. Fixing links (if possible) or adding updates is another matter, but it’s really only something I’d do for active content.

blog archives, currency, fix links, link rot, linkrot, links, old content, web4lib, maintenance