{"id":629,"date":"2009-04-03T01:01:52","date_gmt":"2009-04-03T05:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/?p=629"},"modified":"2009-04-03T01:01:52","modified_gmt":"2009-04-03T05:01:52","slug":"also-an-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/?p=629","title":{"rendered":"(Also: An experiment…)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the last post<\/a>, I made the unspeakable blargger mistake of linking to an article on a news site, which means in 7 days or so, instead of said article this link will return absolute crap and\/or a “Buy membership now!” nag screen. Trying to keep up with such link rot (if anyone bothered) is a problem that grows linearly with the number of posts\/articles written, until it reaches 100% of the blogger’s time and he\/she\/subject\/verb has to stop writing any more posts and become a forest ranger. I’ve ranted this before with some possible solutions<\/a>, but as you may have guessed based on my project completion record to date, didn’t get around to it (got maybe as far as writing a toy script that wget’s pages and stuffs the contents into a database record).<\/p>\n

So a little experiment: Instead of linking to the article directly, I linked to a carefully-constructed “I’m Feeling Lucky” Google query containing unique phrases contained in the article. The idea is that as the site shuffles stuff around \/ deletes content \/ recycles numeric links, rather than a 404* the link should preferentially return a clean copy of the article from somewhere else on the Internet if it exists (syndicated copy, fulltext copy-paste into a blog\/slashdot post somewhere, etc.).<\/p>\n

Let’s see if it lasts any longer than a regular news-site link!<\/p>\n

(For anyone interested, the actual query is:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=%22A+company’s+backroom+mass+of+servers+and+switches+is+cloudlike.+So+are+social-networking+sites+like+Facebook+Inc.%2C+or+the+act+of+buying+a+book+on+Amazon.+Some+clouds%2C+like+Google’s+email%22&btnI=Lucky<\/p>\n

The “%22″ at the beginning and end of the query string itself is the URL-safe encoding for a double-quotation mark (ASCII code 0x22), so that the quote marks in the query don’t conflict with the quote marks in the <a href=”…”> tag. To simulate a click of the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, replace the button-type code that normally appears in the query (btnG=Search) with “btnI=Lucky”. Also note that apparently Google limits queries to a maximum of 32 words.)<\/p>\n

* Modern commercial sites seldom, if ever, actually return a HTTP 404<\/a> code when a document is not found, since software including search-engine spiders detect these and drop 404’d pages from their listings. it’s far more profitable to pretend the user\/bot has reached some kind of non-error document, swap in a generic landing page and stuff it full of keywords and advertising.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the last post, I made the unspeakable blargger mistake of linking to an article on a news site, which means in 7 days or so, instead of said article this link will return absolute crap and\/or a “Buy membership now!” nag screen. Trying to keep up with such link rot (if anyone bothered) is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","iawp_total_views":1,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[108,107],"class_list":["post-629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","tag-108","tag-link-rot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=629"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":632,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629\/revisions\/632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}