I have been working on a project, lately, involving the back-end of this here blog. It keeps me occupied while I wait for the galley proof for my upcoming book publication, and while I wait for my radishes to grow.
Over time, there is a thing called “link-rot” – links to websites become stale due to changes on whatever site is being linked to. Sometimes videos disappear, sometimes new articles get re-named by their hosts, etc.
So part of keeping a long-term blog functional is going back and fixing those rotted links – either replacing them, or simple putting a note, “link no longer works.”
My blog has accumulated a fair number of rotten links over its 15 years and 7500 entries.
But by far the worst offender is the vast number of broken “internal” links – links from one blog entry to another, including to my many pictures. The reason I have this problem is because I had to abandon my previous blog-host two years ago and move to a self-hosted version of this blog. I’m happy with that decision, but it means that 1000’s (yes 1000’s!) of internal blog links from before 2018 do not currently work. Perhaps if you’ve visited older entries, you’ve noticed this.
Anyway, I’m trying to fix all this link-rot – both the external and internal variety. It’s very tedious work – there is no magic “find-replace” that can do it, because the format differences between the old links and the new links are arbitrary.
Ah well. It keeps me socially isolated. Which is, apparently, a goodly thing, these days.
Caveat: Link-rot
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The title of this post triggered a rather humorous reaction in my brain, proving that bilingualism is not always an advantage.
As it happens, “link” is the German root for “left” and “rot” is German for red. Since colors are an everyday means of referring to political parties in Germany, there is a very strong correlation in my brain between words with the root “link” and the word “rot”, albeit a correlation in the German, not English, thinking part of my brain. As a result, my brain immediately hardwired into German mode upon seeing the title and struggled for many seconds trying to make sense of what it was seeing, the title being grammatically incorrect in German and the subsequent text being in English and having nothing to do with politics. It wasn’t until the second paragraph that my brain finally caught up, parsed the title correctly and corrected the pronunciation still reverberating in confusion in my head: English “rot” (rät in phonetic transcription) = decay and not German “rot” (rot in phonetic transcription) = red. Oh, how I then laughed at myself.
For those interested, here’s a link that illustrates Germans’ use of colors for politics. This article reports the results of the 2017 elections:
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/bundestagswahl-so-haben-die-deutschen-gewaehlt-1.3652567