Link Rot
An astute reader pointed out that some links on my site were 404'ing, so I ran a check for the first time in a couple of years. The results surprised me:
| Year | # Broken | # Total | %age |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 | 80 | 505 | 15.8% |
| 2008 | 361 | 2400 | 15.0% |
| 2009 | 464 | 3055 | 15.2% |
| 2010 | 314 | 2074 | 15.1% |
| 2011 | 173 | 1085 | 15.9% |
| 2012 | 243 | 1384 | 17.6% |
| 2013 | 138 | 682 | 20.2% |
| 2014 | 472 | 1114 | 42.4% |
| 2015 | 250 | 962 | 26.0% |
| 2016 | 100 | 657 | 15.2% |
| 2017 | 19 | 336 | 5.7% |
| 2018 | 9 | 374 | 2.4% |
The first surprise is the way the percentage of broken links stabilizes around 15% after a few years. The second is the massive jump in 2014; after a bit of inspection, that turns out to be caused by some posts I imported from the Software Carpentry site without fixing cross-links properly. The third surprise is the broken links from 2017 and 2018: I'm going to have to be more careful going forward.