I really wish I'd read Craig Mod's piece on The Healing Power of JavaScript earlier:
[As we join the story, Mod has decided to use some of the time afforded him by the pandemic to rebuild his personal web site…] In that spirit, as I moved my homepage I also rebuilt it as a so-called static site. A simpler version that should continue to work for the next hundred years. It looks nearly the same as it did before. With static sites, we've come full circle, like exhausted poets who have travelled the world trying every form of poetry and realizing that the haiku is enough to see most of us through our tragedies.
As is true for most infrastructure work, these gruntish behind-the-scenes tasks are often neglected, or derided as irrelevant, underfunded, ignored. That is, until they break, or a pandemic hits, and then we realize how infrastructure is everything, and without it our world reverts to some troglodytic cave state, or perhaps worse, an ever-widening extreme of haves and have-nots. […]
I really wish I'd taken the time to dive in and restore my older content and publish it under one roof again, rather than have the content spread around various ancient archived files, generated by umpteen different Content Management Systems over the years. That was always my plan, but somehow I let myself get distracted1 and kept putting off turning my attention to personal projects like web site rebuilds.
I can't help but wonder whether, if I had rebuilt Sore Eyes, I'd have dared to run a link checker against all the links to external sites to see what didn't generate a 404 response code.2 I've been doing this since early 2000, and I suspect I'd be horrified at the number of sites that I linked to that are no longer up (or, worse yet, which are still up but have been completely repurposed so that the content I was linking to is no longer at the URL I pointed to.)
Do I really want to do that to myself, to confirm to myself how much of that linking - and the work I might have put into restoring and republishing my content - was a waste of time?
Anyway, that's my feeble excuse for having let Sore Eyes fall apart like this. I could start work on resolving the problem tonight, but I plan to spend much of the rest of my evening finishing a rewatch of the last four episodes of the final season of Travelers.3 A better use of my time, I think…
- It's also partly that my working week has continued to be taken up with working from home, so lockdowns 1-3 didn't really free up any time to spend on personal projects. I know, I'm lucky to have been in a job rather than furloughed, but still… If anything, I found myself spending spare time during lockdown thinking about how to live life under lockdown, or just resorting to watching TV programmes of varying qualities to fill up free time and distract myself from my situation. ↩
- Of course, the absence of a 404 response tells me nothing about whether the content that's present at that URL now is still the content I was pointing to at the time. I wonder whether there's some straightforward way to have the link-checker look for the presence of whatever blockquouted content I included in my blogpost. That sounds like one of those things that should be possible, but is almost certainly beyond my coding skills to put together. (Or, alternatively, there's an API for doing that but it'd require me to learn to use an unfamiliar language to make it work and my brain's no longer up to it.) ↩
- A pretty decent - though by no stretch of the imagination hard-SF - tale of time travel from some of the folks who brought us the Stargate franchise. Yes, I already know it doesn't end particularly well for our Travelers, but I'm glad they at least got to wrap up the tale rather than just have it stop in mid-story. ↩