“URLs are forever”. My arse they are.

Since sometime in 2006 I’ve collected links using one web service or another. First it was Delicious and later when Delicious started mucking with their site I moved everything to Diigo. Now I have a library of over 20,000 links there. Oh, and I also use Pocket. Mmmm… nerdy.

Besides being a record of my past procrastination these links are meant to help me find stuff I’ve read or half read in the past. Stuff I think will be useful to me again in the future. Links to webpages about all sorts of stuff. Science, design, web design, marketing, business, management, leadership, inspiration, writing, productivity, book, movies. Those are just some of the tags I’ve used.

Another tag I’ve used is quotes. Find a quote from someone and save the link for future use. Except that’s not what happened. Recently I went through a bunch of those links and found that in many cases the URL no longer lead to the content I wanted. Instead it brought me to a dead page, “404 not found”, or otherwise. Saving those webpages didn’t do any good. Those quotes, whatever they were, are gone. I can’t use those links as a resource for the quotes I post on this blog on weekends.

The idea that URLs are forever just isn’t true. It is an ideal we wish website creators followed. The real web isn’t always built to the standards we wish it was.

URLs are for a while at best.