Posted by jpluimers on 2026/04/10
I mention dead links a lot, and always try to archive content before scheduling it in a blog post.
No different for [Wayback/Archive] Some URLs Are Immortal, Most Are Ephemeral, which provides background information about how the short lifespan of most URLs.
Their 2024 publication was a poster in PNG and PTTX format (linked below under the abstract), so I created this PDF out of it:
Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Event, Internet, LifeHacker, Power User, Web Browsers, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/22
I got the below error when booting a Dell Optiplex 7060 Micro, a machine not just supporting supporting UEFI but preferring it, on which I had copied a backed-up disk image, then moved the hidden Recovery partition to the end of the physical disk (to make room to extend either the OS or DATA partitions).
Fixing it lead me to a trip that was on the boundary of software archaeology, so this blog post has a truckload of archived links to information that is still relevant, but for which the original links have long vanished due to link rot or (often worse) part of the historic information got lost because of migration to new tooling forgot to cover important additions (especially in comments).
One thing that I had to unlearn was MBR disk basics, for instance the fact that on GPT disks a partition can be active (they can only be on MBR disks, but despite UEFI supporting both MBT and GPT, GPT disks are way more common and required). The same holds for partitions having a boot flag: that too only applies to MBR disks. For the same reason, bootrec is only useful for MBR disks. More details towards the end of this blog post. CSM (Compatibility Support Module) booting is the UEFI way to simulate BIOS boot for operating systems that do no support UEFI.
Back to the error at hand:
Posted in Development, History, link rot, Power User, Software Archeology, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Windows XP, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Tagged: 1 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/26
Need to look into this further: [Wayback/Archive] Robust Links – Make Your Link Robust.
Likely running it on my blog requires JavaScript to be enabled which means going from the premium to the small business plan (at te time of writing from USD 8 to USD 25 per month: a 200+% increase).
Let’s first start with an example:
Posted in archive.is / archive.today, CSS, Development, Internet, InternetArchive, JavaScript/ECMAScript, link rot, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, WayBack machine | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/06
Last week I wrote on File scoped namespaces – C# 10.0 draft specifications | Microsoft Learn, promising to write more on p-Code and UCSD Pascal. That’s now (:
I started with [Wayback/Archive] “java byte code” “ucsd” “p-code” – Google Search as I was looking for really old material on this (Java 1.0 versions became available in the 1994-1995 time frame, and a lot of material back then either did not make it to the World Wide Web (which slowly gained popularity around that time, see History of the World Wide Web) or has vanished due to link rot.
The cool thing is that many “new” people are not even aware of p-Code, as the 2019 thread [Wayback/Archive] What do you think about something like Pascal bytecode? shows.
I learned a thing or two from it as well, for instance that there has been a “recent” book on UCSD Pascal:
Posted in Apple Pascal, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, Event, gist, GitHub, History, Internet, link rot, Pascal, Power User, Software Development, Source Code Management, Standard Pascal, Turbo Pascal, UCSD Pascal, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2023/02/27
Knowing part of URL shortening by browsing through shortened URLs and creating auto-generated ones, I was new to create custom shortened URLs.
So here are some links about using bit.ly:
–jeroen
Posted in About, LifeHacker, Personal, Power User, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/04/19
- [Archive.is] Ethan Mollick on Twitter: “The Internet is rotting. This chart shows the percentage of links from all New York Times articles that still work. Over 25% of the links embedded in articles just seven years ago & 60% of older links, are now broken. And tweets & posts are more ephemeral! … “
- [Wayback] What the ephemerality of the Web means for your hyperlinks – Columbia Journalism Review
Hyperlinks are a powerful tool for journalists and their readers. Diving deep into the context of an article is just a click away. But hyperlinks are a double-edged sword; for all of the internet’s boundlessness, what’s found on the Web can also be modified, moved, or entirely vanished. The fragility of the Web poses an […]
It’s all about Link_rot, which is the main reason I have been posting [Wayback] (and when these do not archive, [Archive.is]) archival links in my blog posts since about 2015.
Sometimes I find time to add these to older posts as well, but given there are 7000+ blog posts published, I won’t be able to do that for all past blog posts.
—jeroen
Posted in Internet, link rot, Power User, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/04/05
I’ve written about link rot quite a few times (it even has a category on my blog).
Preventing it is important, as it improves user experience.
For most users this is an unconscious thing when it works and becomes consciously annoying when it fails.
Some user groups are vocal enough to force you to fix link rot after the fact, causing brand reputation damage.
One good example was last year: [Wayback] Users condemn Microsoft for removing KB IDs from some bug documentation | Computerworld.
Posted in Bookmarklet, Development, Internet, link rot, Power User, Software Development, Web Browsers, Web Development, Windows, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/29
A while ago, WordPress.com heavily started to de-emphasise the Classic Editor in order to boost the Gutenberg editor which is bloaty (in both browser DOM usage (heavily slowing down editing) and content (lots of meta tags that are added to blog source) and is missing essential features (especially nesting of blocks often breaks things).
With 7000+ blog posts in the Classic Editor format (a few in still supported markdown format: that experiment failed horribly!) that still require editing (especially because of link rot)
So here is the Bookmarklet code to switch back an editing URL that you can use for as long as the Classic Editor is there:
javascript:location.href=document.location.href+'&classic-editor';
Yup, it is that simple: it appends &classic-editor to the URL.
Posted in Bookmarklet, Classic editor, Development, Gutenberg editor, Internet, link rot, Power User, Software Development, Web Browsers, Web Development, WordPress, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/22
The VMware KB is notoriously bad into being saved in the WayBack Machine: saved links hardly render at all because of the VMware KB dynamic page loading structure.
But VMware KB articles expire, so a lot of web-pages point to non-existing links and end up through redirections at [Archive.is] https://kb.vmware.com/s/pagenotfound.
Below are a few link forms of the same VMware KB 2011818 article that vanished from the regular web. The first is saved in the WayBack Machine (but does not render), the second is saved and does render after a redirect to a saved third form, the most recent saved fourth form is actually a 404-error redirecting to a prior third form.
The first link form does archive as a rendered page in Archive.is if is is archived. t wasn’t, so the current archived version points to the “pagenotfound” page mentioned above.
Sometimes you have to dig deeper, as not all rendering archived versions contain actual content.
Here the first one is not even archived, the other ones are, but none of them have actual usable content:
This means you have to dig further in history:
–jeroen
Posted in Internet, InternetArchive, link rot, Power User, WayBack machine, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/01
I bumped into an old draft on notes on NTFS boot issues.
A while ago, I wanted to boot in the Windows 10 “Safe Mode” console, but the F8 option during the boot process was gone.
So I wondered how to get there. There seem to be a few ways, of which almost all require a functioning Windows installation. When you have one, it is relatively easy, as these options will work as summarised from [Wayback] How to open the Windows 10 recovery console:
Shift key when choosing “Reboot” in the user interface. There are various ways to get to the “Power” button:
Ctrl–Alt–Delshutdown.exe /r /oshutdown.exe /r /o /t 0There is also a possibility to restore the F8 functionality, but you need installation media for it. [Wayback] 3 ways to boot into Safe Mode on Windows 10 version 21H1 explains how to.
(Note that for some of the links, only the [Wayback] ones work: link-rot of the links I saved 6 years ago)
–jeroen
Posted in Internet, link rot, Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 