Blogs are ephemeral things. For example, many folks give blogging a try, but burn out after a while. And many of the fascinating web pages to which blogs link are gone in a short time. And so when one scrolls through the archive of an older blog, many of the links in older posts go nowhere. You get one of those "404" messages. Stolen "hot linked" images from other sites disappear, too. It's the nature of the blog-beast.

We try to minimize those flaws on this site, and one of our ways of doing so has been not to link to OregonLive when there's an alternate source of a story available somewhere else. OregonLive, loosely connected to the O newspaper, has had a nasty habit over the years of taking down content after a relatively brief period of time. At one point, it was a mere two weeks. We're not sure what their deal is these days. But our working assumption has been that links over there will be dead in a short time.

A nice alternative has been Willamette Week, links to which have stayed fresh for years. But alas, something happened recently at the Double Dub, and now most of our older links to stories over there are dead ends. They must have had some sort of changeover in their software, which renamed all their old pages and in the process exterminated thousands of old links. That's a real shame.

We're not sure it had to be that way. Five years ago, when our site completely collapsed due to atrocious activity by a web host, we were eventually able to bring it back to life. But the software we used to regenerate our old content changed the names of all our pages. Thus, we figured that old links to our site would become worthless.

But wait! Our tech hero, Jake Ortman, came up with a program that told our new server what the new name and the old name of each page was, with a command to redirect traffic looking for the old page to the new. It was one of the most amazing things we've ever seen a computer do.

Anyway, wishing that WW had come up with a way to make the old links still work, we mourn their demise. Yeah, we guess we could look up the more important ones with a search engine and rewrite the links. But life's too short -- we aren't going there.