{"id":150093,"date":"2025-10-03T17:24:40","date_gmt":"2025-10-04T00:24:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ma.tt\/?p=150093"},"modified":"2025-10-03T17:58:00","modified_gmt":"2025-10-04T00:58:00","slug":"linkrot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ma.tt\/2025\/10\/linkrot\/","title":{"rendered":"Linkrot"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One of the things I hate most on the internet, and part of the reason I started WordPress<\/a>, was to fight linkrot. Ever since 1998, when Tim Berners-Lee<\/a> wrote “Cool URIs Don’t Change<\/a>,” I’ve been obsessed with content management and ensuring that links don’t break. (BTW, TBL, a pioneer of creating the World Wide Web, has a great new profile out in the New Yorker<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I learned today from the Newspack<\/a> newsletter that the Houston Press<\/a> is now on WordPress. Newspack is a distribution or bundle of WordPress designed for journalism, and it is led by Kinsey Wilson<\/a>, who began his career as a night-shift journalist covering cops for a newspaper in Chicago, went on to have top editorial and business positions at The New York Times, NPR, and USA TODAY, and ran WordPress.com for a few years, which gives him a very unique position to help craft WordPress for journalists and publishers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Houston Press is an alt-weekly that wrote the very first profile of me in the world, which I blogged about here<\/a>. There’s a funny quote in there:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

He recently considered taking a job with a San Francisco search-engine start-up, but ended up turning them down. \u201cThey have a ton of money\u2026But it would be 50- or 60- or 70-hour weeks, a lot of work, and I wouldn\u2019t have time\u201d to do WordPress. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

That “search-engine start-up” was Google<\/a>! How the internet might have turned out differently if I had taken that job, as my Mom wanted me to (because they offered free food). I still think Google is one of the most interesting companies in the world, one of the few places I’d consider working if I weren’t running Automattic<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to linkrot, the original link to the profile in that article was http:\/\/www.houstonpress.com\/issues\/2004-10-28\/feature2.html<\/code>, which this morning didn’t work, but thanks to the Houston Press being on Newspack\/WordPress I was able to ping Kinsey and his colleague Jason Lee was able to fix it so it redirects to the new canonical URL for that content in minutes. A little corner of the internet tidied up! I love the Wayback Machine<\/a>, but not needing it is even better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the things I hate most on the internet, and part of the reason I started WordPress, was to fight linkrot. Ever since 1998, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote “Cool URIs Don’t Change,” I’ve been obsessed with content management and ensuring that links don’t break. (BTW, TBL, a pioneer of creating the World Wide Web, … Continue reading Linkrot<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"fullscreen","default_image_id":54207,"font":"","enabled":true,"token":"eyJpbWciOiJodHRwczpcL1wvbWEudHRcL2ZpbGVzXC8yMDIxXC8wNVwvUGhvdG8tb24tMjAyMC0xMC0yOC1hdC0yLjA1LVBNLTEtMTAyNHg2ODIuanBnIiwidHh0IjoiTGlua3JvdCIsInRlbXBsYXRlIjoiZnVsbHNjcmVlbiIsImZvbnQiOiIiLCJibG9nX2lkIjoxMDQ3ODY1fQ.MYxKo2MBxjnHLmOzmJRXHSY4Nlw5NsQdUDewSNcR9vwMQ"},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[26,2824,62,93,34,59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-new-york","category-press","category-travel","category-wordpress","category-wordpresscom"],"parsely":{"version":"1.1.0","canonical_url":"https:\/\/ma.tt\/2025\/10\/linkrot\/","smart_links":{"inbound":0,"outbound":0},"traffic_boost_suggestions_count":0,"meta":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","headline":"Linkrot","url":"http:\/\/ma.tt\/2025\/10\/linkrot\/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"http:\/\/ma.tt\/2025\/10\/linkrot\/"},"thumbnailUrl":"","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":""},"articleSection":"Design","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Matt"}],"creator":["Matt"],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Matt Mullenweg","logo":"http:\/\/ma.tt\/files\/2021\/05\/Photo-on-2020-10-28-at-2.05-PM-1.jpg"},"keywords":[],"dateCreated":"2025-10-04T00:24:40Z","datePublished":"2025-10-04T00:24:40Z","dateModified":"2025-10-04T00:58:00Z"},"rendered":"