Adding support for Amber on WordPress.com
Current Berkman People and Projects 2016-03-22
This blog is one of many millions hosted on WordPress.com. As a member of the WordPress.com community, I’ve just submitted a plugin request to the user forum, asking WordPress.com to add support for Amber, a WordPress and Drupal plugin that prevents linkrot.
What does that mean? When I link to something in a blog post, I expect readers to be able to follow that link later on. Of course, not all links are permanent. They can “rot,” making it impossible for a reader to find the content I linked to. Amber addresses this problem by archiving the websites associated with the links in a blog post. Then, if the links rot later, the reader can view the archived version of the page. Here’s a video about how Amber works.
As readers of this blog know, I often blog about sewing. I like to link to the pages where particular fabrics can be purchased, both so readers can purchase the fabrics themselves and so readers can see more official details about the fabric. When the fabric sells out, these links often rot, which means my blog posts become less useful over time. I don’t think I have any rotten links on my blog at the moment (let me know if I do!), but it’s something I often encounter when reading blog posts, particularly old ones.
If you would like WordPress.com to add support for Amber, please reply to my forum post. If you can add an example of how linkrot impacts the blogging you do, that would probably help. I also tweeted about this.
