I normally deal with loss straightforwardly enough — it's ugly but it's real and you gotta face it. But I'm finding it hard to deal with blog loss. I've been a fan of PolyglotConspiracy since I first saw the name, surely, and now that fine blog, which had been inactive, is officially "
Essentially discontinued". That's a blow. Good old Wishydig at least has promised to get back in the game more actively (
here), but even he had to say "I am still here, and this link is not defunct." A couple of other (non-lingua-)blogs on my blogroll are likewise at the very least on long-term vacation, MIA or maybe dead.
So my question: Do I leave them, as reminders of fine old blogs that I really liked? Or is it bad enough to have moribund links that the unhappy housecleaning is required? Seriously, I'd appreciate advice.
And yeah, I know the pic doesn't quite fit the post, but I'm kind of a sucker for PunditKitchen.com.
7 comments:
I'd say leave them, one never knows when they might get updated. I have to say, on one linguablog I was linked in the sidebar to bulbulovo, who at that point had been MIA for some time. I read through everything (or mostly everything), added the RSS feed to my reader, and have very much enjoyed the sporadic updates ever since.
Yeah, keep them. If you're feeling a compulsion to tidy, create an MIA section at the end.
Just what I wanted to hear! (And the MIA idea is brilliant.)
Thanks!
I like James's idea of a MIA section, or a "rarely updated" section as found on Literal-Minded.
Maybe I should do something similar myself. From my sidebar I dropped Editrix and Everything You Know About English Is Wrong, among others, but I didn't feel good about it; I just didn't want to send people to inactive blogs. But the content is not invalidated. A signal that the sites are updated infrequently, if at all, would be a good solution.
How do you check on blogs to see if they've been updated? I use an RSS aggregator; specifically FeedDemon. That has a 'Dinosaurs' report where I can check on blogs and other feeds that haven't been updated for a while. I a few cases I'll remove a dormant blog completely, but in most I'll leave it in hope ...
For me, the language blogs that I link to are those that I visit regularly, so the point at which I would remove a link is the point at which I no longer plan to return to it. (Of course, this doesn't work if you read blogs via an RSS feed.)
I would eventually remove a link for inactivity, but the appropriate time frame would be twelve months or more. (Currently I think Q Pheevr at A Roguish Chrestomathy is leading, with just under 100 days before the anniversary of the most recent post...)
I'd say leave 'em and label 'em, too.
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