Checking for Old, Rusty Links


Photo by Clearly Ambiguous.

If you blog about MathCounts, beware that they recently overhauled their website — which made almost everyone’s links to them obsolete. I ran a routine check for dead links and found quite a few on my blog. I hope that I’ve caught most of them, but if you stumble across one of those nasty “Page not found” messages when you click a link on my blog, I hope you will report it in the comments section.

Also, if you have the old www.yashar.biz/mathcounts/ page of past MathCounts problems bookmarked, that one has disappeared as well. I suppose it was probably a copyright violation, but I appreciated the site while it lasted. [Edited to add: Hooray for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine! Woohoo!! 🙂 ]

Ah well, the AMC archives, MathNotations blog, and Elias Saab’s Preparation Drills site are still great resources for math contest students.

By the way, does anyone know of a really good, free service for checking a website for dead links? I used LinkTiger, which did a good job and reported its results so that even I could understand them. But their free service only checks 1,000 links a week, [free service has been discontinued] and they tell me I have over 6,000 on my assorted blog pages. That many? It’s difficult to believe — and even more difficult to keep them all current!

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