Link Rot and Eight Iterations of ewancroft.uk

website history and link rot

Eight iterations of ewancroft.uk, each leaving a trail of dead URLs. The biggest damage came during the Hugo phase (versions 2–4, roughly January to December 2024) — moving to the current SvelteKit site shifted the entire file structure. Every old link became obsolete. Around 20 links died in that migration alone. Later built the slug mapping system to handle URL transitions gracefully — old paths redirect to new ones via a lookup table. The lesson: every redesign has a cost in link rot, and mitigating it requires deliberate effort, not just hoping search engines figure it out.