Yesterday, as I was frantically researching for my upcoming talk at WordCamp Baltimore, I wanted to get all the details on WebKit’s implementation of the srcset attribute. A link to .Net magazine, a leading resource of information about website design and development, was the third option that came back on Google.
I clicked on it, only to be redirected to a welcome page on CreativeBloq.com. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t actually find the article I was looking for. I was able to bring it up on Google’s cache, but still. (The article in question, FYI, was all of one month old.)
As is my tendency, I ranted about it on Twitter:
so clicking on an old link to a @netmag article now takes me to the “welcome to @CreativeBloq” post INSTEAD of the article? ::eyeroll::
(https://twitter.com/taupecat/statuses/380372956708630528)srsly, can’t find the @netmag article from last month that i googled on @CreativeBloq. pissed. thank goodness for google cache.
(https://twitter.com/taupecat/statuses/380373632687800321)
This led to not one, but two articles on the importance of preserving our digital history: Shane Hudson’s Stop Deleting Content! and Smashing Magazine’s Good Content Is Too Valuable to Die.
On more than one occasion, my Twitter rants have gotten me into trouble. But if I’ve stirred the pot with yesterday’s tweet, then I’m glad. As WP Daily found out when they folded up shop earlier this year, there is a demand for the preservation of old content. What might seem dated and unimportant to a maintainer could be a valuable resource for someone just discovering it for the first time.
Fortunately, in the case of WP Daily, Torque Magazine stepped up to the plate and preserved the digital history that WP Daily had made in its short run. The breadth and depth of Net magazine’s content is much more extensive. I hope that somebody, whether they, their new home at CreativeBloq, a third party or the authors themselves, can do the same.