{"id":16807,"date":"2025-10-04T00:24:40","date_gmt":"2025-10-04T00:24:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailysutoon.com\/?p=16807"},"modified":"2025-10-04T00:24:40","modified_gmt":"2025-10-04T00:24:40","slug":"matt-linkrot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailysutoon.com\/?p=16807","title":{"rendered":"Matt: Linkrot"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the things I hate most on the internet, and part of the reason I started WordPress<\/a>, was to fight linkrot. Ever since 1998, when Tim Berners-Lee<\/a> wrote \u201cCool URIs Don\u2019t Change<\/a>,\u201d I\u2019ve been obsessed with content management and ensuring that links don\u2019t break. (BTW, TBL, a pioneer of creating the World Wide Web, has a great new profile out in the New Yorker<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

I learned today from the Newspack<\/a> newsletter that the Houston Press<\/a> is now on WordPress. Newspack is a distribution or bundle of WordPress designed for journalism, and it is led by Kinsey Wilson<\/a>, who began his career as a night-shift journalist covering cops for a newspaper in Chicago, went on to have top editorial and business positions at The New York Times, NPR, and USA TODAY, and ran WordPress.com for a few years, which gives him a very unique position to help craft WordPress for journalists and publishers.<\/p>\n

The Houston Press is an alt-weekly that wrote the very first profile of me in the world, which I blogged about here<\/a>. There\u2019s a funny quote in there:<\/p>\n

\n

He recently considered taking a job with a San Francisco search-engine start-up, but ended up turning them down. \u201cThey have a ton of money\u2026But it would be 50- or 60- or 70-hour weeks, a lot of work, and I wouldn\u2019t have time\u201d to do WordPress. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That \u201csearch-engine start-up\u201d was Google<\/a>! How the internet might have turned out differently if I had taken that job, as my Mom wanted me to (because they offered free food). I still think Google is one of the most interesting companies in the world, one of the few places I\u2019d consider working if I weren\u2019t running Automattic<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Back to linkrot, the original link to the profile in that article was http:\/\/www.houstonpress.com\/issues\/2004-10-28\/feature2.html<\/code>, which this morning didn\u2019t work, but thanks to the Houston Press being on Newspack\/WordPress I was able to ping Kinsey and his colleague Jason Lee was able to fix it so it redirects to the new canonical URL for that content in minutes. A little corner of the internet tidied up! I love the Wayback Machine<\/a>, but not needing it is even better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the things I hate most on the internet, and part of the reason I started WordPress, was to fight linkrot. Ever since 1998, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote \u201cCool URIs Don\u2019t Change,\u201d I\u2019ve been obsessed with content management and ensuring that links don\u2019t break. (BTW, TBL, a pioneer of creating the World Wide Web, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t