Image credit: Paul Ritchie’s “Broken Web Connections? Welcome To 2009…” I was reading John Johnston’s blog this morning (gotta keep up with my European peeps) and his post about fighting linkrot hit home. Every morning I wake up to an email letting me know a few more links on the bava have died, I pour out a little Louis and mourn the day. As of now I have 2,801 posts with 19,583 links. Of those links, 2721 are broken. That’s just about 15% of all the links on the bava lost to the anals of time. BASTARDS!!! While I was reading John’s post about linkrot I was reminded of a conversation I had with Kin Lane and Tim Owens over a year ago about how Kin has a link archiver he programmed that preserves all the connections on his various sites by taking screenshot of links before they die. I was very jealous, because every morning I still wake up to the bava obituary of links in my inbox. So, when I read about the Berkman Center’s new tool called Amber that prevents just this kind of linkrot by taking screenshots of existing links I was fired up. What an awesome tool for them to build for folks. Inspired, I decided then and there to finally put a tourniquet on the bava link hemorrhaging. The fact that they have a WordPress plugin that allowed me to send the screenshots to an S3 bucket and the Internet Archive was that much cooler. It was dead simple to setup, and I feel like I just started down the road of preservation of my past thinking, the links to which will only get more fragile with time. Nothing like a little amber to preserve the action: 100-million-year-old spider attack captured in amber.