The Cobalt Club Annex
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So many dead links!

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So many dead links! Empty So many dead links!

Post by DanTheChase 4/11/2022, 9:51 am

Hi guys. This is a really neat old time radio group. I've been an old time radio fan since age 11. I've been a member for quite some time, but never kept up with all the great stuff going on here. Now that I'm looking through it, I'm sorry I did not participate sooner. I'm perusing the topics, I'm seeing all this GREAT stuff that has been shared, and I click it... gone. It is just making me very, very sad. Sad Anyway, that's my problem. Thank you all. I hope there's more yet to come.

Dan

DanTheChase

Posts : 19
Join date : 2019-01-02

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Post by gathol 4/13/2022, 5:52 am

I do understand. That really is the way the Club has always worked even back to the days of dial-up. People were uploading shows to the clubs own server then, so they had to remove the links to the files two weeks after posting because there was only so much room on the server. It would take me about 12 minutes to download a 6mb file as I recall, so I could only follow about 4 or 5 threads at a time. Now with these free cloud services the links only seem to last 7 days. So, I do understand your frustration, but all you have to do is ask for a repost of something, and generally someone who has downloaded that file will post it again so you can get it. My experience since I first joined is that Club members have always been very gracious and generous in their sharing.

gathol

Posts : 157
Join date : 2013-04-15
Age : 61
Location : the Hoosier state

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So many dead links! Empty zombie links

Post by BobStep 6/1/2022, 5:41 pm

The "dead links" topic is close to an "issue" of mine that I've been repairing when I can... Not about links in this forum, but in the many Internet Archive and OTRR Library collections of MP3s. I don't think there's an easy solution, but maybe some readers with older websites or blogs have other workarounds. By "Zombie links," I mean links to files that are still out there, but their names or addresses have been altered on a web server.

Background: I write a blog that routinely links to MP3 files hosted elsewhere -- mostly at the Internet Archive, but sometimes at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

The problem: Often when someone updates an archive collection there is some "Improving" of file names, which disables previously existing links to those files. My solution -- watching for reader reports of broken links, or testing my old pages from time to time, then locating the new name and address of the file and editing the HTML of my blog page. (WordPress also updates its editing tools from time to time, making things "easier" for new users but sometimes breaking MP3 player links on my 10-year-old pages.)

Keeping the old stuff up to date makes an interesting retirement hobby.

Some keepers of files just seem to want to get as much information as they can into filenames, regardless of the older internet conventions about avoiding "reserved" punctuation mark characters and spaces. These days "percent-encoding" allows such things in online filenames; servers present the previously forbidden spaces with a percent sign and the number 20, as in this somewhat verbose example:

Downloaded to my desktop, it looks fine as:
"Big Town 49-05-10 (479) Confession (bad rep nightclub owner offers Steve Wilson exclusive story & tape of a murder).mp3"

But here's what I'd need to put in the HTML code of a blog page to link to it:

Big%20Town%2049-05-10%20(479)%20Confession%20(bad%20rep%20nightclub%20owner%20offers%20Steve%20Wilson%20exclusive%20story%20&%20tape%20of%20a%20murder).MP3

Unfortunately some "edit in page" website editing systems may force a "line break" within such file names, disabling any links to them. Those two sets of parenthesis also might be a problem, since they are "reserved codes" in web addresses and have not been converted to their percent-code equivalents, %28 and %29

Since I'm an infrequent visitor here, here's what I'm up to:
My research interest is radio shows that had characters in categories like "newspaper reporter" or "editor," "columnist," etc., or that somehow reflected the "golden age of newspapers" as well as radio. I'm fascinated by the way the "new media" of radio treated the "old media" newspapers as a piece of cultural history.

I thought I might make an academic specialty out of this odd obsession, and a dozen years ago started using a WordPress blog -- [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] -- to sort out my ideas. I shared it with a class on the "Portrayal of journalists in popular culture" and had a few online discussions in the page comments, which was fun. Alas, most students were more interested in the sections of the course about movies and novels, especially recent ones with zombies or that girl with the dragon tattoo.

Meanwhile, health issues led me to retire earlier than planned, but I kept the research blog going -- taking full advantage of the fact that my WordPress host does not charge me for linking MP3 players to files that are stored elsewhere -- such as the archive.org and ottrlibrary.org servers. I still dive in with a new post once in a while, or edit and rewrite the longer "Topic" pages, which are listed as a menu at the top of the page. Some are almost chapter-length. For instance, you'd get a 10-page printout if you printed the page about radio adaptations of "newspaper movies," [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

(That's one with a lot of links, some of which may be broken -- to other pages of mine, IMDB pages, and maybe even some YouTube videos.)

Feel free to drop in at JHeroes and leave comments on any blog post or page that has a comment space at the bottom, including additional information about shows, differences of opinion, or alerts to non-functioning links!

Cheers,

Bob Stepno
Radford, VA

BobStep

Posts : 1
Join date : 2019-08-31

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