Links to imslp.info not working

[hansenkd]

Hello, all:

First time posting on the forums, but some of you may know who I am. I am the creator of the Brahms Listening Guides website (www.kellydeanhansen.com). For several years, I've maintained IMSLP score links on the various guides, and for the most part, they've always worked. I recently discovered, however, the most of them were not working. Apparently, any link to imslp.info no longer works. Checking the work pages on the wiki, it looks like most of the scores do in fact now have different URL's that do not begin with imslp.info.

I can obviously go through my pages and change all the links, but is there any way to ensure that the links will not become dead, or do I just have to keep checking for maintenance, server relocations, etc.?

Links to my guides are present on more than half of the Brahms work pages (the ones for which I do have guides), and nobody has yet given me any grief about linking directly to the pdfs from my site. Depending on what the answer is as to why the links on my pages no longer work, I suppose I can just link to the work page, but I prefer not to do that. I'd like to provide my own explanations about the scores to which I am linking, link to the best available, etc. This has been the motivation behind most of my own edits to the Brahms work pages (and some of my work with piupianissimo). I suppose I can keep checking and changing the links, but that's a pain.

I've been absent from my site for a while as I completed my Ph.D., but now I'm returning to it. I had no idea until this morning that the imslp.info links weren't working anymore.

On a related question, I've noticed that some of the Brahms work pages have been changed to move the external links to the "General Info" box. In those cases, the links to my guides have been changed to "KDH Listening Guide" from the previous "Detailed Listening Guide" (which I had originally entered). However, on some work pages, the external links are still outside the "General Info" box and my links still say "Detailed Listening Guide."

I don't really care one way or the other, but it would be nice to have consistency. I hope somebody will go through the Brahms work pages and check the "General Info" boxes and the locations of the external links so that the links to my guides (again, they are on a little more than half of the 122 opus pages) will be consistent--either "KDH Listening Guide" or "Detailed Listening Guide." Just so the location and description are similar on all the work pages. It looks as if some of them changed, moving the external links to the boxes, but others did not.

Any help you can give me, especially with advice to linking externally to the scores and making sure the links don't die, would be appreciated.

[hansenkd]

If I use links of the form http://imslp.org/wiki/Special:ImagefromIndex/22970 will that help my problem of links becoming dead? It seems like this shortcut is relatively permanent, but I don't know if it will work for an external link.

[cypressdome]

I can't answer your question regarding linking directly to the files but the "Detailed" versus "KDH" Listening Guide issue appears to simply be an issue of one page using a hyperlink and the other using the KDHgd template to link to your site. Since the template is the preferred method I'll try to work my way through the Brahms pages to update the links.

Cypressdome

[hansenkd]

Thanks much!

I wonder who created the template. I didn't. The hyperlinks were from me--the original links to the pages. When I add a guide, how do I use the template?

Regarding the links--imslp.info doesn't seem to be a dead domain. There are some files that link to javanese.imslp.info. But all the imslp.info links on my site are dead. I'm going to try to convert them all to the SpecialImage type of link to see if that helps. I'm thinking it should--and that would add consistency to the links anyway--some of them are erato.nl and other stuff.

[cypressdome]

Carolus created the template back in June, 2011. For using it on the wiki if, for example, you wanted to link to your page for Opus 20 you would input the following:

{{KDHgd|20}}

The resulting link would display as "KDH Listening Guide"

I've updated them through Opus 28 by the way.
Cypressdome

[cypressdome]

Also, just as an FYI we have added a number of Brahms first editions that are higher quality scans than those from the Brahms-Institut so you may want to link to those instead.

Cypressdome

[hansenkd]

Thanks, Cypressdome!

I'm hoping that inserting the shortcut Special:Imagefrom links will permanently solve the "link dying" problem. I also noticed some other things, like the Brahms-Institut scans of the Op. 39 waltzes being separated into their different versions (they were together in one huge file before). I've noticed your scans of some autograph manuscripts, but not any first editions besides the Brahms-Institut ones. It looked like there were some monochrome versions of the first editions from Russian sources on some of the pages, but the Brahms-Institut scans are full color.

I'm obviously going to have to go through all the links again--it may be worthwhile to include the manuscripts!

[Carolus]

The big advantage of using a template for this relates to what you mentioned above - the fact that URLs can change over time. With the template, if the listening guide site's address changes, we only have to do a single update (to the template itself) and all the links will be changed at once.

[hansenkd]

I'm going to keep kellydeanhansen.com for the listening guides for quite some time, though. The site is hosted through godaddy.com, who just ended free economy hosting with domain purchase. But since it was a feature when I bought the domain from them, I am grandfathered in, and get to keep the free economy hosting plan--and best of all, the ads are now gone and will stay gone!! Hallelujah! I'll be doing an update to the front page soon (at the same time as I fix all the score links with the Special:ImagefromIndex shortcuts), and will remove the reference to the now-no-longer-existent godaddy ads at the top of the page. I was also going to try to mirror the site at CU-Boulder again (they've set up a new webspace program), but since I just graduated with my Ph.D., I can't use their servers for web hosting anymore--but with the godaddy.com ads gone from kellydeanhansen.com, mirroring the site is moot--there's no need to do it.

So things have worked out really well on that score--as long as I keep renewing the domain and don't let it expire.