Let Them Go

Those hyperlinks did a lot for me, in nearly two decades.

But I have let them go.

There was a time I had opinions on this blog – about the corporate world, science writing, academia. But I trod carefully (or so I think).

But there was one subject I was passionate about:

Link rot.

I could not have it.

And so I ranted!

I had written articles about historical engineering feats, carefully referencing quotes from this wonderful original research paper I had found on the site of a governmental organization. Then they relaunched their website. I found the paper again and fixed the link. Did this in a loop, steps 1 to n. When n was reached, the website was modern, responsive with shiny clunky buttons, and not a paragraph longer than two sentences. Because: Attention span! Gone was the repository of historical papers.

I have been web.archive.org-i-fying old links, but it is a game of whack-a-mole. I might not have bothered so much, had I not gone to great lengths to preserve my early 2000s URLs myself.

Before I started this blog and website in 2012, I had other several websites I built myself from scratch without any platform or framework. I have re-written the code several times. Starting with so-called classical Active Server Pages, moving on to .NET and text-based databases, and finally developing a static site generator in python. All were little Content Management Systems. The .NET version had lots of typical blogging features like posts / pages / categories / tag cloud / archives.

The challenging part of these projects was not the code – this was the fun part. The challenge was to accommodate the gradual shift in the goals and ideas behind these websites. To find common main categories. On migrating several sites again and again, I first cut one site into several and later unified them again. The static site generator was also incorporating a copy of this blog. I wrote a little parser for the WordPress XML backup files to extract the content as text.

I hoped to unify everything, and live in my small world of non-interactive, non-comment-atable websites happily after. This blog had been offline for a few months in late 2019 and early 2020 – until the virus hit, and I wanted more community and less nerdy blogging again.

Where was I? Back to URLs and their stability or mutation!

My old ASP script files used the file extension .asp, and I carried that over to the other versions of the sites. I was proud of my hack for the static site. I challenged myself with not using any server-side scripts or URL rewrites. How to redirect from oldname.asp to the – still existing – newer version? My site generator created a folder named oldname.asp and placed a html file in it that did the ancient re-direct via meta tags. I am not telling this story to impress anybody with questionable dinosaur web skills. I just want to prepare the ground for a recent shocking turn of events.

Having tended to this little Zen Garden on the web for more than 20 years, the company that hosted my sites was gradually changing the focus of their business. I had to take my domains and websites somewhere else. It would have been easy to choose another host offering simple old-school static web space. But perhaps the universe was telling me something?

The old websites got harder and harder to maintain. My developer’s to do list had been growing. I would have needed to overhaul the parser for WordPress’ backup files. Late to using the Block Editor, I discovered the HTML comments in the XML backup broke my parser. But I rather wanted to write code for my math- and physics-inspired art.

I had mixed feelings about all the website rewrites. TI had put so much energy into the infrastructure of the sites that I felt that work depleted my storage of blogging enthusiasm. When the site was ready for being filled with “content” again, I had not been that motivated anymore. Most recently I just copied stuff from this site to my home-grown systems.

So, I have pointed my domains to this site. All the funny old hyperlinks go nowhere. There is one exception for an link referenced by Wikipedia.

To my surprise, I do not miss the old pages and posts.

My mood is captured in this image. This is what my code should be used for! With respect to blogging, I gleefully revert to being “just a user” who occasionally tinkers with CSS and explores plugins!

This is my interpretation of the spherical harmonic function Y_33. It looks like six hamburger buns arranged at the corners of a hexagon. I’ve created it with my hand-written JavaScript code – no AI involved!

The original image is 6000 pixels wide, and I scaled it down to 1200 pixels and reduced JPG quality to 95% – to keep the performance of my overview pages (with many images) somewhat OK.

This is how the lines look really look like at the original resolution:

This blog has a category for my website adventures, including technical details of one of the redesigns. But I do not feel like linking to it!