Link Love
I did a bit of tidying yesterday.
It was pissing rain, windy and chilly so it was a day for relaxing indoors.
I decided to revisit my old Links Page which has been running for a couple of years now. What I found was rather sad. One hell of a lot of the links are dead. So I spent an hour or two going through them, weeding out the ones that were either blatantly dead or that hadn’t been updated for so long that they had cobwebs. I haven’t finished yet. It’s really sad to see some of my old favourites gone.
I never got that damned Links Page to work properly. What I wanted was a list of links, what they had posted and when. After a lot of swearing [I do swear occasionally, I’m ashamed to admit] I did get the page running but it only works sometimes. When I load the page, it just appears to be an ordinary list. In theory, if I wait a while, all the links should suddenly populate themselves with the lasted post title. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, which is annoying.
Then I wanted to sort them, with the most recently updated links at the top, but I can’t do that. The options are somewhat limited and time isn’t one of ‘em. I didn’t want the As and Bs getting all the attention so they just display randomly.
Maybe I should just bin the page altogether.
Fuckit.
It loads okay for me but lots of them are very old. Sometimes more than 100 days old!
Works for me too. I have to wait about 3 to 4 seconds before the fancy links and latest posts per show up but that’s more a matter of plugin functionality than anything else especially if the “fancy list” plugin has to contact an external server or some such nonsense as that. Nice to see that I’m one of the more up-to-date sites in the list–amazingly enough.
There are some blogs that seem to appear and shine brilliantly and then just disappear – which is a pity.
I’m not sure how old the average blog is, I fear some of us are approaching the antique stage!
Mossy – I haven’t finished trawling through them yet! How out of date should they be before I decide they are dead though? Some people don’t post that often!
Kirk M – I predume the plugin waits until the page has loaded before kicking in, which produces the delay. At least there is something to look at while it’s working. If it kicked in before loading the page, most people would assume the page was dead!
Ian – You have been around even longer than me, haven’t you? That raises an interesting question – which is the longest running site on my list? And I am not going to wade through the archives of each one to find out!
Links? Going golfing?
I started mine in May 2004
(Though I post all the scam letters I receive with 1970 dates – that seems to be the beginning of time for the Internet – I’m amazed how often people arrive on the site having used addresses from the scams as their search terms)
tt – There y’are!! I was getting worried. Life is very quiet without your sarcastic comments and nasty remarks.
Ian – I’m impressed! Over eight years? That must make you one of the longest running in the country?
Let’s see now, my old site will be 7 years come February. It’s actually a bit older if I consider it’s first iteration on other blogging platforms but several first posts went missing during the various transitions to DYI WordPress install so they don’t count. I’m pretty amazed that WordPress (and me) have held up this long. 😉
Kirk, Grandad moved my site from blogger to its own address in February 2007. He said he knew a couple of guys with a truck who would do the job and, apart from a few posts falling off when the truck hit potholes, the blog arrived safely and has been living quietly and peacefully ever since.
This site is only a nipper then. 6 next month!
Nasty? Really ?
Nah! Never.