I say I’m an archivist but I’ve been rather blasé about archiving my own web presence. I can’t find an archive of my GeoCities site and the Wayback Machine only has a single capture from my university undergraduate page (I had already graduated a couple of years before that). But I started collecting my own domains around the early 2000s and the Wayback Machine is a reminder of the many iterations of my personal website,1 the different hand-coded templates, CMSes, and static site generators that I used, and all the text that I published and abandoned over the years.

I can recover some of this material from the Wayback Machine or from my own hoard of old laptops (if the hard drives haven’t died). In theory, I agree with the World Wide Web Consortium that Cool URIs/URLs don’t change. But does anyone care if my old URLs are broken? And what should I do with URLs that point to embarrassing content?

Having lived half my life on the internet, including the early, wild days of the web when only spooks, nerds, and weirdos early adopters were online and we had very different (or absent) notions of security, privacy, and anonymity, I face competing impulses to preserve everything I can, and to hide or disavow some of my past. Change and growth are signs of maturity, aren’t they? Thankfully I haven’t yet been called out for decades-old writing that I now regret. I’m not even sure if there is anything really incriminating or embarrassing out there. Rather, I’ve let URLs fall by the wayside because I didn’t think my words were significant enough. But even setting aside that opportunity for therapy, I now work for an organisation that values collecting ephemera for the stories they tell of marginalised communities.

If I want to take a personal stand against linkrot, it’s easiest for me to start by working backwards from today. When I rebuilt this website in Hugo a few years ago, I kept a few earlier posts, and there are even more unpublished posts hiding in plain sight in git repositories. Just looking back over the last three years, there’s one post about a code editor that is no longer maintained, and two posts about tools I built to track and filter COVID-19 exposure alerts. Inspired by Wikipedia’s templates for referencing dead or archived web pages, I have created Hugo shortcodes for dead links either with or without archived versions in the Wayback Machine or other web archive services,2 as well as for a disclaimer to add to the top of outdated posts. You can see these shortcodes used on these posts:

The source code for the shortcodes are in this site’s git repository on sourcehut.

  1. The Wayback collection for claudinec.net only goes back to 2010, but this is not my first or only domain. ↩︎

  2. I have formatted the archived links as Robust Links, which capture both the original and archived URLs in machine-readable form. ↩︎