Monday, April 05, 2010

Moribund blogs ... A question

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:

Anonymous said...

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.

James Dowden said...

Yeah, keep them. If you're feeling a compulsion to tidy, create an MIA section at the end.

Mr. Verb said...

Just what I wanted to hear! (And the MIA idea is brilliant.)

Thanks!

Stan said...

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.

arnie said...

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 ...

Anonymous said...

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...)

The Ridger, FCD said...

I'd say leave 'em and label 'em, too.