Here's a lesson I learned the hard way this week: don't rely solely on links for your clips. One of my favorite lifestyle articles was posted online until the website stopped publishing. Fortunately, I got paid the full fee last year, but I don't have the pretty clip formatted with graphics and a photo anymore.
I even had some advance warning, because my editor sent me a nice note to let me know that they wouldn't be publishing anymore but she wasn't sure if/when the archives would stop working. I took the lazy way out and did nothing.
Here's what I could have done so I'd have it even after the link died:
- Converted the page to a PDF (I use DocuDesk for PDF-making).
- Printed out the article so I'd have a hard copy I could scan later.
- Taken a screen shot and saved it on my computer somewhere.
- Copied the text and graphics into a word doc (not ideal because it would lose some of the nice formatting, but still an option).
Changing links is another issue to watch out for when you're sending writing clips via email or posting on your website. Here's my newest article: Decoding Business Lingo. Time for making PDFs!
UPDATE: Thank you to Grammar Geek for the brilliant suggestion that I look up my articles using Google's cached pages. See her comment on this post for full instructions!