As long time readers will know, xmas eve, 2013, my friend Brandon Dawson died of an overdose.
Brandon – despite the obvious – was a kind and generous human being, and a good friend, and i’m forever grateful to him for hosting so many of my (and my friends) blogs, free.
However, his demons won out, and when he passed away, he left me locked out of our server (he’d recently updated passwords, and didn’t give them to me, or did, and I didn’t write them down). I struggled to get access to our server, but was unable to do so.
Several friends lost blogs when the server was taken down; I was lucky to be able to export all my writing from THIS blog, though I lost a few others (one that was sort of a secret, exorcising the demons and confess the sins sort of thing which is probably better gone, anyhow).
As i’ve mentioned, I was able to recover nearly 1400 entries; everything, basically. But in rebuilding all of this, i’m finding a vast number of broken links, including internal links (my direct links used to be at site/blog/archives/<title>.php, but is now site/title), lost images/songs/etc, as well as the simply outdated (links to news articles, links to now-gone blogs, etc)
All in all I had more than 1500 broken links. I’m gradually repairing all this (sometimes by deleting no longer relevant entries, sometimes by just un-linking, and going forward, sometimes updating links). But, it’s quite a bit of work.
Why do this? Well, first, broken links hurt SEO, which I am trying to improve to bring in more readers (and by more, I mean, higher single digit counts; i’m keeping expectations low here). But also, for the couple of friends who may delve into archives (Hi Liz!), broken links are annoying (and annoying for me as well).
I’m down to 1350 broken links as of this writing, but I think it’s just going to take weeks of a-few-at-a-time to get through it all, with the image posts being hardest (trying to figure out if I have the original images someplace, and then uploading, or replacing, or just un-linking).
or i’ll give up and quit dickin’ around and just wrote porn instead.
Mmm. Porn.
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