Shadow Footprints

Wanderings in Virtu and Verity.

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Fight Linkrot

Calpundit explains how to fight linkrot of NY Times articles. A link generator is available for this purpose.

He also provides the following ranking of the most archive-friendly major news organizations:

Tier 1: CNN, the Guardian, and the BBC all have permanent archives that never disappear.

Tier 2: The Washington Post places old articles behind an archive wall, but previously existing links to the articles work forever. The New York Times makes permanent links possible, even if they're a bit of a pain.

Tier 3: The LA Times places all its content behind an archive wall after a few days and breaks any existing links.

Purgatory: The Wall Street Journal is in a class by itself, since their content is never accessible free of charge on the Web.