Dead links

A lot of the old posts are about sites that do not work anymore. Some changed URLs and some are just gone. It bothered me.

So I wrote a quick tool to check the links in posts, add a "deadlink" tag, and if it is the old standard link blog post, edit the post to not have the bad link an actual <a href>, but just show it.

I use the "spider" mode of wget at the heart of the check, with a command line nearly out of the manpage. In a small inital run, I found that the default retries for unresponsive sites were excessive. I adjusted that down.

linkchecker

On entries that I find a new link for, I'll have those tagged fixedlink to highlight that it's an old post which has had edits.

Also after yesterday's logo post, I fixed two bugs in the post filter. One was serious, dealing with a lack of an anchor on the .code operations, one was minor, putting punctuation outside of anchor tags. At the same time I added an <pre> handler which also accepts ``` style markdown fences. I updated the tests to match.