Every once in awhile, I change blogging platforms. Recently I have been working on a switch to Hugo. Whenever I go through this exercise, I religiously check for broken links. There are always plenty.
Most of the time, when broken links are found, I can find a replacement. Sometimes not though. Sometimes something is just gone. No new address. No record in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Just gone.
I know I’m contributing to this myself by changing hosts and blogging platforms. I’ve even lost almost all of my own posts from before 2011.
I’ve noticed a couple of things happening in my posts as a result.
First, a lot of the broken links get replaced by pointers to relevant pages on Wikipedia.
Second, I’ve moved my blog hosting to GitHub Pages. (It’s actually been there for about a year now.) Hopefully, the platform can remain the same for awhile. Just have to keep paying for the domain name.