maintenance

Abby Sewell, with photographs by Jeff Heimsath, in The National Geographic:

Every spring, communities gather to take part in a ceremony of renewal. Working together from each side of the river, the villagers run a massive cord of rope, more than a hundred feet long and thick as a person’s thigh, across the old bridge. Soon, the worn structure will be cut loose and tumble into the gorge below. Over three days of work, prayer, and celebration, a new bridge will be woven in its place.

The Q’eswachaka bridge has been built and rebuilt continuously for five centuries.

The bridge is 120 feet long, over a gorge of considerable, but unstated, depth.

It’s said to be at -14.3811214,-71.484012.

Allen asked, via the web4lib list:

I’m interested in how others handle linkrot in library blogs. Do you fix broken links? Remove them if they can’t be fixed? Do nothing?

Michael answered:

I deal with link rot on blogs as I would with any other publication, print or otherwise: do nothing. The post is dated and users should be aware that links from two years ago may no longer work.

We need to understand that the web is a living, breathing, and sometimes dying organism. The forrest will renew itself.

Dropping the metaphor, link rot is frustrating, but deleting links is deleting history. Fixing links (if possible) or adding updates is another matter, but it’s really only something I’d do for active content.