'tis been a catch up time for me. On soooo many levels. Don't get me wrong though; not all of it's "work". I'm behind on my gaming too; I was out of the country during the Death Stranding 2 release so that's a high priority too! (Should finish the main story this weekend.) But one of the many things I'm behind on is my "marketing" mail. I tend to send it all to a dedicated box so it doesn't clutter my more important messages, and I tend to give it a quick look, but often miss things if I get too much on one day. As a result I let it build up so there's about three months worth, then I bulk go though and delete most of it leaving just the last month. (I keep things that are still relevant, such as orders that take several months to arrive.) Anyway, this got extra built up so I had loads to do. Is this relevant to this story? Not 100%, but this is my rant so...
I was almost finished with this, at around the 40 day mark, and I noticed one that I wanted to investigate. But the links were dead. It was about a new lens on a camera site, but it just gave me a "did you get this right?" style error.... Wow. I get this issue a lot while sorting old EMail, but it's generally things like time limited sales, and generally a lot older than a month. In the early days of the interweb this was considered really nasty stuff. You really had to work to get someone to even care about your page and by association your link, and thus if someone wanted to see a resource you'd deliver! I've always tried (not always succeeded for various reasons) to maintain links or at the least provide a re-direct. For example my (in a sore need of an update) SPS-52C page. This link has been valid-ish (the redirect goes to the root as it's got more facts) for over 20 years... In this case I especially don't get it as it could have went to a sub page, such as a brand search, but clearly someone at that company doesn't really care.
But this does seem to be more the norm these days, and it's one of the many reasons why keeping direct links (as opposed to bookmarking at the site itself) is often pointless. Some sites do seem to try, by having text in the link so if the direct link fails there is the option for search to find something (hopefully) relevant, but a pure fail to me is nasty, and from a marketing point of view a potential loss. Sites like the WaybackMachine sure have a hard job these days! This is partially all caused by the nature of websites these days. For better or worse "pages" don't really exist anymore on most sites. A link goes to a program that produces a "page" based on what you wanted and what they want you to see. This way theming, ads, regionalisation is all automatic and thus pages are more relevant, flexible and can be stored more efficiently. This site does it and SinnerComputing does too. (Mine is custom, this site is (currently) just an off the shelf CMS.)
This does go further than me being lazy sorting my mail though. The near impossibility of creating a reference to web content will make proving anything much harder in time. Too much news is on social media sites, where often there is a login wall, and the ability for someone to edit or delete posts. I used to often rant that the 90s is a bit of an interweb black hole, but really anything that hasn't been archived externally should be considered lost already. Hopefully at least the links in this rant stay valid!
Scary stuff. But.
At least I've sorted my mail.
