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Linkrot

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Keith Instone, writing on the site Usable Web in December 2012, taken from the Wayback Machine:

“I just noticed that Alertbox articles (and other things) from useit.com are now incorporated into nngroup.com”

Ah, two sites belonging to famous usability consultant Jakob Nielsen.

“From a practical perspective, it means different URLs for Alertbox articles.”

Uh-oh. Jakob hasn’t broken a load of links, has he?

“So far, all of the redirects seem to be working (no linkrot).”

Excellent. Well done, Jakob.

Back to Keith and the site Usable Web, today:

500 Internal Server Error

Oh well, maybe it’s just temporary. Let’s take a look at March 2016:

403 Forbidden

Linkrot… on an article about linkrot. Bonus points go to Usable Web for having the slogan “Links to web usability history”. Not much history present there any more.

See also: famous designer Jeffrey Zeldman complaining about a web community being destroyed, and then destroying one himself.

(Don’t look too far in the past on sites I’ve been involved with, though. I definitely didn’t write a pompous article about all this years ago which suffered exactly the same fate. Promise.)

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