Well, every one I could find, anyway.
A couple months ago Photobucket decided overnight to charge $399 a year for hosting photographs for blogs and message boards. All pictures on affected sites disappeared and were replaced with an ugly black square demanding money to have the picture restored. It would have been much better to simply have the pictures disappear, rather than have ransom demands appear all over the blog. The black squares didn't contain any useful information, like which Photobucket folder the original picture was in, for example. This meant that the only way to patch up the blog was to read every entry, decide which photo had been between which paragraph, find it in a sea of unsorted downloaded photos and replace the black square with the correct photograph.
I had about 1100 to find and replace over 1600 blog entries. It's taken so long that if I'd paid myself minimum wage to work on it, I would have spent more than the $400. But that would only have solved the problem for a few months, before the next year's fees were due. I found all but 30 or 40. In some of those posts I've left a note that the link died and there is no picture, and in some cases I deleted the post entirely.
Additionally, more than 500 YouTube links had broken in the past ten years, just due to the natural turnover on YouTube. I've found almost all of them on another uploader's channel and relinked. More than nine or ten years back, I didn't spend any time on this, so the very early posts on the blog have those empty video containers. If you come across one and you can't find a re-upped version, let me know in comments and I'll see what I can do.
I didn't check very many of the text hyperlinks. Where I had time, I fixed broken ones or linked to the Wayback Machine where I could. If I couldn't relink, I left a note. However, there are literally thousands of links that I didn't check. There's probably an app that will point them all out to me. If you know of an app, let me know.
In some cases where there's a sequence of pictures, I made an effort to put them in the right order but there may be errors. For example, I have a fairly long analysis of Jimmy Page's eyes in the movie The Song Remains The Same. Thumbnails (not Jimmy's thumbnails, the pictorial ones) were linked to larger versions and to gifs or clips. I hadn't annotated any of them. I had to simplify those, and one hopes I got the right screen cap with the right description. If anything's unclear, once again, let me know in comments.
Another thing I found was that, over the years, I've written some thoroughly goofy stuff. The temptation to just delete them (especially some of the early ones which have had literally less than 20 views) was almost overwhelming but I just let them be. Just as retweets are not endorsements, my patching up a four-line post about some minor long-forgotten online battle is not an indication I'm still carrying that grudge.
Here's to the next 1600 and obstacle course of platform changes!
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