Libweb and the Seven Year Itch

[Thomas Dowling]

My own little contribution to the Web's grand collection of lists of
lists, Libweb, turns seven tomorrow.

Within the last month or so, Libweb passed the 6000-site mark.  My
continued thanks go out to the many people who have submitted sites to
help maintain this commercial-free site, and to the Berkeley SunSITE for
hosting it.

Libweb now includes regular link checking, which has helped to cut down on
the inevitable occurrences of 404 errors.  As a by-product of this, its
search engine now reports the date of the last successful check and some
HTTP header information you may find interesting, in a techie-nerd sort of
way.

Now that I'm getting updates on which sites have gone missing, I can do a
little poking around to discover their new locations.  However, I have the
time and inclination to do only a very little poking: sites that turn out
to be unfindable get deleted from the directory.  This is especially
likely to happen with public libraries whose pages live at commercial
ISPs.  When you move from there, there's usually no pointer to where
you've gone, and no obvious parent web site that might provide the new
link.  I've actually deleted more sites than I've added over the last few
weeks - a good reason to get a reasonable domain name and stick with it.

In addition to the main location at
<URL:http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Libweb/>, Libweb is available at several
mirror locations, and any non-commercial site is welcome to mount their
own copy, provided they're willing to update it at least once a month.


Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu