Tuesday, November 04, 2003

Give A Hoot -- Don't Pollute (I know half of my readers will have no clue who the owl is on the left -- but tough.  Work on your cultural literacy, you barbarians.) This actually is one of my peeves:  websites that are way, way, way out-of-date and probably won't be updated anytime ever.  You know the sites I'm talking about.  Ones that say "Last updated May 12, 1999," complete with the crappy animated flame gifs.  I hate finding a site like that. Worse are the sites that say "Under Construction"  -- and last updated sometime before Clinton had ever heard of Lewinsky. CNN had a nice article about this same issue.  As the Internet grows, and as more years pass, more and more websites that have long since been abandoned will appear in your Google searches.  More and more sites that haven't been maintained that have links that only go to sites that are either equally dead, or gone altogether.  The internet trash can is filling up and no one wants to empty it. Perhaps websites need an expiration date that can be set when they are created.  The creator would get an automatic series of reminder emails letting them know that the date is coming.  If the site isn't updated relatively soon after that date passes, or if the expiration date isn't reset for a later time, then the site is deleted.  I think that's a great idea.  Props to me! By the way, is it still cool to say "props"?  On second thought, maybe slang needs an expiration date, too.  Related sites: Ghost Sites:  Where Dead Sites Live On Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:  Browse 30 billion archived sites from 1996 on. 5:48:18 PM     |

© Copyright 2005 Alex L. Mauldin.