Broken web stuff bothers me, especially when it’s my own stuff. Unlike when companies like Google et al break things, I can fix my own.

I was scouring for a ten year old blog post (there was a purpos/ed but that matters not) and came across a hand rolled web page for a presentation I did in 2011.

But oh, the white space where once there was media! I actually counted (and fixed) four different dead web technologies in one small html site.

Screen shot of web page with red text marking blank areas of no content for Flash-based slideshare embed, flash audio player, old YouTube embed, and Feed2JS embed to dead del,icio,us feed

Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!

 - Find & Share on GIPHY

Here is what I found:

  1. An (un)embedded Slideshare presentation that used an old Flash based player. DEAD
  2. An (un)embedded YouTube video that used some kind of deprecated iframe url format. DEAD
  3. An mp3 file set to play in a Flash audio player. DEAD
  4. An RSS Feed displayed using Feed2JS (a technology older than this stuff that still works) but the feed was from a del.icio.us tag. DEAD

The fixes were easy. For (1) and (2) I just had to go back to the source content and get modern embed code. The audio is easier now to do using an HTML5 audio player structure. And since long ago I migrated my social bookmarks from del.icio.us to pinboard I could grab the RSS feed URL for my tag, pop it into Feed2JS, and get an updated cut and paste embed code.

And here it is, all the way from February 2011, presentation resources from Looking Through the Lens, a talk I did for the Instructional Technology Council eLearning 2011 conference (their link is dead but I can unearth it from the WayBack Machine and hah, I forgot, I was a featured speaker, pftttt).

Here’s four dead embeds brought back to life.

The same web site now showing the slideshare embed, an audio player, the youtube video, and a set of bookmarks from pinboard displayed

Not dead at all! In fact this web page feels like dancing…

The rest of the web can crumble, fade, be unplugged, but stuff I have in my domain, I can keep the lights on.

What do you have from what you did 10 years ago? How will all those fleeping twitter threads uncrusted with emojis look like in 2031?

Good luck with that.


Featured Image: Public domain image of tombstones from Snappygoat modified by me to list the four dead embed technologies.

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An early 90s builder of the web and blogging Alan Levine barks at CogDogBlog.com on web storytelling (#ds106 #4life), photography, bending WordPress, and serendipity in the infinite internet river. He thinks it's weird to write about himself in the third person.

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