2021-11-28

Link Rot

#gemini

For some reason today I decided to rescan my public bookmarks, more precisely the "articles" section.

gemini://ew.srht.site/en/bookmarks.gmi

Of those 16 links 6 links were offline or not found. So sad. With the help of

gemini://geminispace.info/

I could find 3 of them moved or renamed. The remaining 3 I have to consider "lost":

The official archive of the short lived but imho excellent SMOG (Saturday MOrning Gemzine) I found at least two copies, one here:

gemini://bulletpr00f.host/smog/index.gmi

Articles, that I would like to keep, shall be saved locally. I use emacs/elpher and download articles (not whole capsules) to a directory like $top/elpher-mirror/gemini/$server/$path_to/$file.gmi. Along the way I have toyed with Stephanes tool agunua/geminitrack to mirror the SMOG archive. I have also suggested to plugd (author of elpher) that sort of a download-to-local-mirror command would be useful imho.

Apparently link-rot is larger than I expected. So maybe you want to routinely mirror some content as well.

So big thanks to René of search engine fame! Thanks to those, who mirror content! Thanks to those, who don't change their content, or at least the paths and filenames!

Cheers,

~ew

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