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fix: via.placeholder.com shut down in 2024 (now connection-refused)#66

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kiluazen wants to merge 1 commit intoperplexityai:mainfrom
kiluazen:fix/dead-placeholder-urls-2026-04-22-batch6
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fix: via.placeholder.com shut down in 2024 (now connection-refused)#66
kiluazen wants to merge 1 commit intoperplexityai:mainfrom
kiluazen:fix/dead-placeholder-urls-2026-04-22-batch6

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docs/examples/disease-qa/README.mdx references via.placeholder.com/... URLs. The service was shut down in 2024 and the DNS record no longer resolves.


Why this is needed

via.placeholder.com was shut down in 2024 and its DNS record no longer resolves — every request now hangs or returns a connection error. Browsers render a broken-image icon in place of the intended placeholder.

Verify in any shell:

curl -sI --max-time 3 https://via.placeholder.com/300x200 || echo 'connection refused / DNS gone'

What this PR changes

Fixes the screenshot placeholder in the Perplexity API cookbook's disease-qa example README so the screenshot renders when devs browse the cookbook.

Replacement details

placehold.co supports the identical ?text= query param for captioned placeholders — drop-in match. Same 800×450 dimensions.

Background

I'm tracking dead image-placeholder endpoints (source.unsplash.com/*, via.placeholder.com/*, placekitten.com/*) across public repos as part of tteg, a tiny CLI/HTTP API I built so projects can drop in real Unsplash photos without registering an Unsplash app or managing API keys. tteg is not introduced as a dependency by this PR — the diff uses the dependency-free canonical replacement domain. If you want topic-matched real photos as a follow-up, the no-key HTTP API is at https://tteg-api-53227342417.asia-south1.run.app/search?q=<query>&n=1 (CORS-on, no auth).

One extra artifact you may find handy: a public scanner at https://tteg.kushalsm.com/scan?url= that highlights dead-placeholder patterns in any landing page — useful for verifying the fix lands and for finding other places dead URLs slipped in. Source: https://github.com/kiluazen/tteg-landing/blob/main/scan.html.

Research note covering the broader broken-placeholder landscape: https://github.com/kiluazen/tteg/blob/research-note-autark/RESEARCH.md.

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