A Hasty Patch Job

While writing up my reflections on a deep dive into The Eye of Argon I wandered over to my web site linking to the MSTings posted to Usenet to take in Adam Cadre’s distinct take on the story. When I clicked the link, though, I got an error message from Google. I’d known the links I had put together some time ago had begun redirecting, but now I was half-convinced Google’s access to old Usenet posts had degraded that much further and the redirection had broken.

I’d at least gone to the point of saving plain-text copies of the MSTings back before that option had degraded away. There’d always seemed something a bit gauche about depending on Google like that, but I’d also been stuck wondering just how far the bandwidth of my inexpensive web hosting would stretch with more files being accessed. In taking one more look at the links, I sorted out the problem was trying to link to “Google Canada,” and some search-and-replace did produce new HTML I could upload to revive my site in a hurry. That does mean I’m still left weighing the thought of hosting the text files myself, and whether or not I should try to obfuscate the more than twenty-year-old email addresses in them the way that’s done on Google now.