Embeds Did Serious Harm to one of My Websites

Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash Introduction Michael Harley wrote a piece called How I make my blog posts more resilient a couple of days ago. There are a lot of good ideas and principles that he covers for maintaining a blog, or just about any website. Reading his article made me think back to a situation from nearly ten years ago where I went through a fairly major incident with one of my sites. While I documented the issues broadly at the time, I only partly talked about one of the issues that I had to deal with: broken third-party embeds. I thought a discussion about the issue(s) I ran into, and how I handle them would be appropriate as a companion piece to Michael’s article. Inciting Incident In 2018, I had to make a number of changes to The CerebralRift. (You can read all about these changes in the articles I posted back in 2018: CerebralRift Goes KABOOM!, Extreme Website Cleaning, The Long Grind Aftermath, and A Pair Of Post Cleanup Rants. But I don’t recommend it. They’re…