I’m easy to toss shade at web sites who move/ change structures leaving swaths of linkrot or just do not flex their power of maintaining their own links. But in the pot name calling kettle department, I’ve got plenty of bad links under my name. So I get focussed on fixing them.
One came to my attention lately that I was unaware was broken, as they worked for me (note if you answer tech issues please know that The Worst Thing you can say to someone is only, “it works for me”).
This tale takes some rewinds. If you are looking for some kind of post about he top 10 AI tools, then, wrong blog.
A key part of my information flow / semi-management is bookmarking sites in the old school del.icio.us style of Pinboard. If you scrape back far enough, in the pile are web sites I bookmarked back in the Web 2.0 days of your when del.icio.us was a thing. I am able to save a web site title, link, my own notes or its own description, and yes, those old school tags to organize them according to my own system,
I forgot who said this long ago, it rings of maybe Clay Shirky, but the key aspect of social tools is that it first provides a value to me, that I can save links, find them again, and group them by tags, but at the same time, it can ve of value to a larger set of people who use that service or just can access it (e.g. stuff share to the same tag).
Anyhow (as the prelude grows longer and longer), I bookmark suff almost daily to my pile of suff which is publicly available at https://pinboard.in/u:cogdog/. Over time, I have set up in SPLJ style (Small Pieces Loosely Joined) actions that are triggered when I use a specific tag, using services like IFTTT, Make.com, and Zapier, relevant for this post:
- Pinboard bookmarks tagged “cooltech” and (also “smallweb”) get shared through my Mastodon account using IFTTT and a gizmo/trick I learned on how to post content from an RSS feed to Mastodon (pinboard tags have an RSS feed, yay), in a format I can modify as a template.
Maybe not significant in the wide scheme, but I like an approach where I can construct a template for the way I share, so it sounds like me, and is not just “here is something cool”, but also “here is where to find more”
- Pinboard bookmarks tagged “oegconnect” get posted to the OE Global community space. I had to use Zapier for this as IFTTT did/does not have an integration. But it was easy to set up as a free “zap”
I’ll leave this for a link to see an example, but in this case, I can include the entire description field I add/write in Pinboard, plus I can provide similar links to see other items I have previously shared.
All of this is a means to say, I was very sure that, because my Pinboard account is public, that all sites a shared under a tag that I could see were openly visible- e.g. https://pinboard.in/u:cogdog/t:cooltech/ or https://pinboard.in/u:cogdog/t:oegconnect/— the links worked fine for me. Why wouldnt’ they?
I’ve been doing this for years, maybe, but did not know until recently that if you were not logged into a Pinboard account, instead of seeing all the stuff I had tagged, you got this (I confirmed in an incognito browser window, e.g. not being logged in).
This is strange, as counterintuitively all of these can be seen without logging into Pinboard (a shout of thanks to Tom Woodward who bounced back to my Mastodon WTF post”
- All of my bookmarked links https://pinboard.in/u:cogdog
- The RSS feed for my bookmarks tagged cooltech https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:cogdog/t:cooltech
- And a format of my cooltech tagged links URL written a different way https://pinboard.in/u:cogdog/?query=cooltech
I thought easy, I pay for Pinboard and sent an email to the support address listed in my account. Nothing. I resorted to looking at its Twitter profile, which had a personal email for its creators, Maciej Ceglowski. Nothing. Sigh, sent a tweet to @Pinboard. Nothing. Finally, after quote tweeting myself (and wiping my disgust for using the Platform I Will Only Call Twitter):
It’s an unfortunate anti-crawling measure (the site was getting hammered). I’m working on an alternate way to share stuff with non-users without a login barrier.
Tweet from @Pinboard
I’m not bent out of shape irate, and more embarrassed I did not even know I was using bad links for so long.
But the beautyof your own web stuff us being able to pop open the hood of the engine, and duct tape in your own gix, for me, a simple matter of changing my broken links from https://pinboard.in/u:cogdog/t:cooltech/ to https://pinboard.in/u:cogdog/?query=cooltech
Just writing this inanely long post about how to fix a bad link, is, well silly. And not the point. It’s more about not being always reliant on a platform and finding your own fixes. It’s pure DIY.
And while I was fixing busted things, I had a page of Cool Stuff created to be dynamically updated by my Pinboard RSS feed, but I had it relying on my now dead Feed2JS service. That too was an easy fix, as WordPress has a basic RSS block for embedding feeds.
The web fixing work ever ends. And I think that’s a good thing. It’s more satisfying than just typing into a box again and again trying to get a shiny thing out of the machine.
Featured Image: Mine. I take photos of rotten apples. Why? I might need it one day, today.
