I cleaned out my dead links

I cleaned out the dead links on my site today. The internet is a great place, in no small part because of its ephemerality. I heard about the dead link checker somewhere online and thought, what the hell, let’s see what it says.

There were, broadly, 6 classes of dead links:

1. Links that had never existed, like my fediring and hotline webring links, or the most confusing link of the bunch, https://gary.onl/i-finally-finished-the-internet/, from my Junited 2026 post. I half-remember reading this post and liking it, but as far as I know onl isn’t even a TLD. Weird!
2. Links that did exist but were behind some kind of anti-bot firewall like Cloudflare, Anubis, go-away, etc. This was the bulk of the “dead” links. This one, I get, I mean I had to update my robots.txt to allow the deadlinkchecker bot to crawl my site. Scraping is a scourge, the internet is dead, you know.
3. Now-defunct sites, like linklings.club. I only wrote about them in my May bookmarks post, so it’s a bummer to see them gone so soon.
4. URLS that had moved. I and noa were the biggest offenders here; we’ve both apparently moved pages from /name.html to /name/.
5. Weird typos and copy-paste errors when I authored, including this one that, because of where it’s linking, worked out anyway.
6. Lots of git repos that were apparently taken down or hallucinated completely by me for my SI editors post. I did get to find a new fun little editor though!

In some cases, I tried to find an archive of the page on the Wayback machine; in others, I moved the URL; and in a few, I simply deleted (well, commented out) the link. They say that on a quiet night, you can still hear the ghosts of the dead links calling out across the Web …….

I should do this every year or so, like spring cleaning.

PS. My favorite dead link fix

Oh, and my favorite: I had linked to a Sam Altman tweet for my Human made badging post, of course using xcancel instead of actual twitter because Elon Musk can suck eggs.

Of course, in the intervening period xcancel was itself canceled, so the link quit working. I did a cursory search and found a page recommending the Wayback machine, to which I said, of course!

But did I wayback twitter? No :) I wayback’d the xcancel post, hehe.