Sounds like an old magazine ad, doesn't it? "Link
rot" is the nickname for the common "404 Error" — Internet
links to nonexisting pages. Pages are continually moved or deleted
but their links are not always updated—thus rotted or broken
links. Relax.
FINDING the page or site no
longer exits, most users wince and consider it a lost cause. Not
so at all. Since 1996, the Internet Archives has been scouring the
Web every few months, archiving its pages, and storing them for free
perusal at http://www.archive.org/index.php.
All you have to do is go
to the WayBackMachine at the Archives, following these steps.
Paste your copied url/link
into the Machine's address space, then click on "Take
Me Back."
Select which version of the page
you want (it often gives you a choice of several years).
VOILA!
You've accomplished what you
thought was impossible.
If all of that isn't good news enough,
try this: There are no ads or popup messages! The Archives is a
501 nonprofit institution that has archived 85 billion
Web pages since 1996. Included in the collection is: software you
thought was gone forever; moving images; texts; audios; and live
music.
Right
now it's one of the Internet's best kept secrets—but
it won't be for long. As Alan
November points out in his seminars: That MySpace page with
you in the dirty toga or skimpy bikini when you were 18 years
old—five years from now, when the Internet Archives site
isn't such a secret, that page will be sitting there for a prospective
employer to ponder. Oops.
Excerpted from The
Read-Aloud Handbook (6th edition):
How common is “link rot”? According to two professors
who did a 27-month study tracking 515 links to educational material
on the web, one-third of them were dead in 2.25 months and half
were dead in five years. [1] Are half the books in a library completely
out of date in five years? Hardly. Internet "link rot" amounts
to having half the exit ramps on American highways ceasing to exist
in five years but no one told the map makers.
FOOTNOTE:
J. Markwell and D.W. Brooks, "Broken
links: The ephemeral nature of educational WWW hyperlinks," Journal
of Science Education and Technology, 11, 2002, pp. 105-108; also:
Markwell and D. W. Brooks, "'Link Rot' limits the usefulness
of Web-based educational materials in biochemistry and molecular
biology," Biochemistry
and Molecular Biology Education, 31, 2003, pp. 69-72,
online: http://www-class.unl.edu/biochem/url/broken_links.html;
also: Andrew Trotter, “Too Often, Educators’ Online
Links Lead to Nowhere,” Education
Week, December 4, 2002,
pp. 1, 15.
To
search this site, use the Google search
engine to the left. You can also consult the Site
Contents page. Occasionally Google reports
older, out-of-date pages ("404
Error") which can usually be found using
the Internet
Archives (pasting the missing URL
into
the "WayBackMachine" space).
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2007, 2008, 2010, 2011 by Jim Trelease and Reading Tree
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