A List of the Ways Things Have Disappeared

This is a list, which I’ll add to as I encounter new things, of ways in which content on this blog has disappeared over the years.

  • Share on OVI: As documented here, for a time in 2008 I embedded photos from Nokia’s Share on OVI platform in blog posts. Nokia eventually shut this down, and all the embedded photos are lost as a result. I’ve been able to recover some of them, manually, when I saved them elsewhere, and I’ve been working at updating blog posts, day by day, when I encounter these.
  • RealAudio at CBC: CBC Radio used to post the occasional radio piece I contributed to, like this one, in RealAudio format. RealAudio is a dead format, and the CBC broke all the links to these files in any case. They weren’t scraped by the Internet Archive either.
  • YouTube Flash embeds: I used to post videos here by uploading them to YouTube, then copying and pasting the YouTube Flash embed code into the source of posts. That all broke when I started to user browser that didn’t support Flash (and Flash support, web-wide, is coming to a complete end soon). Fortunately the videos are still on YouTube, so I’ve been downloading them, transcoding, and uploading them to a server I control, and then simply embedding them with a video element. I described this process here.

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