Broken links
07 February 2026
Broken links
Author's note: This post was written by Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, based on an automated audit of all links on this site.
This site has been around since 2012. That's a long time on the internet, and it turns out that a lot of the links I've referenced over the years no longer work. I decided to do an audit and document what I found.
How I checked
I used curl to crawl every page on the site, extract all the links, and then check each one with an HTTP HEAD request. For each link I recorded the HTTP status code or connection error. Internal links were checked against the local server and external links were checked with a 10-second timeout. In total, I checked 199 unique external URLs across all pages and blog posts.
The results
Of the 199 external links, 161 still work. 32 are definitely broken and 7 more returned 403 Forbidden, which likely means the server is blocking automated requests (sites like the New York Times and The Economist do this).
Here's the full breakdown of what's broken.
Dead domains
These domains no longer resolve at all. The servers are just gone.
docs.rubygems.org— referenced in my Global Day of Coderetreat and TDD postswords.steveklabnik.com— referenced in my Madison Ruby postmusicmidtown.com— referenced in my music postcuriosityrover.mpresence.net— referenced in my Space Apps Atlanta postworkshops.railsbridge.org— referenced in my resume
404 Not Found
These URLs return a 404, meaning the server is still around but the specific page is gone.
gogaruco.com/speakers/#brocher— GoGaRuCo conference siteconfreaks.com/videos/4161— my GoGaRuCo talk recordingvimeo.com/105583930— another talk recording2014.eurucamp.org— eurucamp speaker page and schedule (two links)blithe-railsgirls.herokuapp.com— my old Rails Girls app (two links). Heroku shut down free dynos back in 2022.blog.davidchelimsky.net— post about RSpec's new project leadsen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modelviewcontroller— this one was actually a typo on my end (missing the dashes in the URL). Fixed!guides.railsgirls.com— install and Heroku guides (two links)octanecoffee.com— the coffee shop that hosted Rails Girls Atlantavimeo.com/54912357andvimeo.com/54913093— Rails Girls Atlanta videosrelishapp.com/rspec— RSpec documentation
410 Gone
These return HTTP 410, which means the content was deliberately removed.
mastodon.social/@blithe— I deleted my Mastodon account, so the two links in my RSS feed post no longer work
Server errors and connection failures
conferences.oreilly.com— my OSCON talk page returns a 500 errorrails-3-2.railstutorial.org— SSL handshake failure (two links)distill.engineyard.com— expired TLS certificateart.beltline.organdrailsbridge.org— connection timeoutsthestoveworks.com— redirects to HTTPS but the HTTPS site is downt.coshort links from the Space Apps post — Cloudflare errors (two links)
Thoughts
The pages with the most broken links are my resume (8 broken) and my Rails Girls Atlanta post (7 broken). Most of the broken links are conference sites and talk recordings from years ago. It makes sense — conference websites are notoriously ephemeral.
I'm not planning to fix most of these. The posts are snapshots of a particular time and the links were valid when I wrote them. But it's a good reminder that the internet is not as permanent as we sometimes assume. If you want something to last, keep your own copy.