Of Link Rot and Personal Blogging

Every now and again I take a little time to tidy up the ever-growing archives of this blog. Tidy up the appearance, check for link rot, correct years-old spelling mistakes, add tags to posts published before Movable Type had a tagging system, that sort of thing…

I’ve just done January 2006, and I’ve bee struck by two things:

1. The link rot is pretty bad, for three and a half years. The BBC and national newspaper links are all still good, as are most of the blog links. But Channel 4’s links are long gone, as are most to the start-ups of the era. The permalink is nowhere near as perma as we would like.
2. My blog was so much more personal back then. Less of a focus on journalism, although it was still a major theme, but a lot more random stuff that would hit Twitter or The Rest of My Life these days. I miss that random element a little.