Web developer Trevor Morris has a short post on the attrition of web sites over the years.
I have run the Laravel Artisan command I built to get statistics on my outgoing links section. Exactly one year later it doesn't make good reading.
[...] The percentage of total broken links has increased from 32.8% last year to 35.7% this year. Links from over a decade ago have a fifty per cent chance of no longer working. Thankfully, only three out of over 550 have gone missing in the last few years of links, but only time will tell how long they'll stick around.
As pointed out in the early and mid 1990s, the inherent centralization of sites, later web sites, is the basis for this weakness. That is to say one single copy exists which resides under the control of the publisher / maintainer. When that one copy goes, it is gone.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 30 2024, @10:39PM (1 child)
Counterpoint: to update my auto maintenance records requires me to think of doing so while I'm at my desktop, fire up FileZilla, FTP in the existing page, text edit in the new list item (trivial), save, upload, and generally I'll load the page to see my handiwork. Major problem with that is taking the 5 minutes, at my desk with my computer all fired up, to write the line into the page. I probably only log 1/3 to 1/2 of the auto maintenance items I should, which is infinitely better than 0.
On the sailboat, I frequently don't have a computer handy, so there's a traditional little waterproof log book sitting on the nav table, begging me to take the 30 to 90 seconds required to log whatever it is that wants logging. It's not accessible anywhere but in the boat, but that's where 90% of its value lies anyway. Being 5x quicker to make a log entry, I probably log about 80% of what I should (these days, anytime I forget to log something I wish I had later I generally do log it the next time it happens.) Main thing that doesn't get logged with that system are "party cruises" where it's a chaos circus getting the guests/kids/etc. off the boat and everything else that NEEDS securing secured before we go blundering back to the car(s) for whatever comes next. I suppose I could be a more disciplined captain and just ignore the peons while I write in the logs, but when one of the kids goes sprinting down the dock heading for god knows where it's all hands + captain to deal with that.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2024, @12:03AM
> to update my auto maintenance records...
...requires opening the file drawer, stuffing the itemized receipt from the shop in the front of the file folder for that car (all paper) and closing the file drawer. Takes a few seconds, since my memory for which drawer that folder lives in is (still) pretty good.
When I'm ready to sell that car (or really bored), I total up the receipts, write it on a scrap of paper and staple that batch together so I don't have to run that total again.