An interesting idea from Tantek for an offline page that links off to an archived copy of the URL you’re trying to reach—useful for when you’re site goes down (though not for when the user’s internet connection is down).
Remy has turned his linkrot-battling technique into a service that you can use. He has more details on his blog.
Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1970 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes.
I really, really like the progressive enhancement approach that Remy is taking here with outbound links:
When a real user clicks on a link, it’s swapped out to be redirected through my own endpoint that checks if the URL is still OK, and if so permanently redirects the visitor, otherwise my endpoint checks the Web Archive for the URL and permanently redirects to that instead.
I think I’m going to do the same! I’d have to rewrite the server-side code in PHP, but that shouldn’t be too tricky.
This could a project for the next Indie Web Camp I attend.
Go spelunking down the archives to find some lovely graphic design artefacts.
A false sense of security persists surrounding digitized documents: because an infinite number of identical copies can be made of any original, most of us believe that our electronic files have an indefinite shelf life and unlimited retrieval opportunities. In fact, preserving the world’s online content is an increasing concern, particularly as file formats (and the hardware and software used to run them) become scarce, inaccessible, or antiquated, technologies evolve, and data decays. Without constant maintenance and management, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. Our modern records are far from permanent.
Time capsules on the moon, using NanoFiche as the storage medium.
Clicking through these cold war slides gives an uncomfortable mixture of nostalgic appreciation for the retro aesthetic combined with serious heebie-jeebies for the content.
The slides appear to be 1970s/1980s informational or training images from the United States Air Force, NORAD, Navy, and beyond.
A short documentary that you can dowload or watch online:
The film explores how image banks including Getty gain control over, and then restrict access to, archive images – even when these images are legally in the public domain. It also forms a small act of resistance against this practice: the film includes six legally licensed clips, and is downloadable as an HD ProRes file. In this way, it aims to liberate these few short clips from corporate control, and make them freely available for viewing and artistic use.
Licensed under aCreative Commons 0: “No rights reserved” license.
I like how Luke is using a large language model to make a chat interface for his own content.
This is the exact opposite of how grifters are selling the benefits of machine learning (“Generate copious amounts of new content instantly!”) and instead builds on over twenty years of thoughtful human-made writing.
This Is My Jam was a lovely website. Created by Hannah and Matt in 2011, it ran until 2015, at which point they had to shut it down. But they made sure to shut it down with care and consideration.
In many ways, This Is My Jam was the antithesis of the prevailing Silicon Valley mindset. Instead of valuing growth and scale above all else, it was deliberately thoughtful. Rather than “maximising engagement”, it asked you to slow down and just share one thing: what piece of music are you really into right now? It was up to you to decide whether “right now” meant this year, this month, this week, or this day.
I used to post songs there sporadically. Here’s a round-up of the twelve songs I posted in 2013. There was always some reason for posting a particular piece of music.
I was reminded of This Is My Jam recently when I logged into Spotify (not something I do that often). As part of the site’s shutdown, you could export all your jams into a Spotify playlist. Here’s mine.
Listening back to these 50 songs all these years later gave me the warm fuzzies.
If you’re thinking of signing up to Hive or Post:
If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way.
Consign that app to oblivion.
dConstruct 2022 was great fun. It was also the last ever dConstruct.
If you were there, and you’d like to re-live the magic, the audio from the talks is now available on the dConstruct Archive. Here they are:
Thanks to some service worker magic, you can select any of those talks for offline listening later.
The audio is also available on Huffduffer on the dConstruct Huffduffer account. Here’s the RSS feed that you can pop into your podcast software of choice.
If you’re more of a visual person, you can watch videos of the slides synced with the audio. They’ve all got captions too (good ones, not just automatically generated).
So have a listen in whichever way you prefer.
Now that I’ve added the audio from the last dConstruct to the dConstruct archive, it feels like the closing scene of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Roll credits.
Kevin takes my eleven-year old remark literally and points out at least you can emulate LaserDiscs:
So LaserDiscs aren’t the worst things to archive, networks of servers running code that isn’t available or archivable are, and we are building a lot more of those these days, whether on the web or in apps.
This is an archive of the very earliest Web browsers — the true pioneers, the Old Gods, the Ancients:
WorldWideWeb, LineMode, Viola, Erwise, Midas, TkWWW, Samba, Lynx, w3, FineWWW
There are some tasty designs in this archive from Sainbury’s.
The history of humanity in food and recipes.
The timeline of this website is equally impressive—it’s been going since 1999!
Deleting your old thoughts may be giving your older self a kick they really don’t deserve. And the beauty of having an archive is that you don’t need to decide whether you were right or not. Your views, with a date attached, can stand as a reflection of a specific moment in time.
Reconciling every past view you’ve ever had with how you feel now isn’t required. It sounds exhausting, frankly.
The Long Now foundation has a write-up on my recently-lost long bet:
On February 22, 02011, Jeremy Keith made a prediction that he hoped would be proven wrong.
Eleven years ago, I made a prediction:
The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years.
One year later, Matt called me on it and the prediction officially became a bet:
We’re playing for $1000. If I win, that money goes to the Bletchley Park Trust. If Matt wins, it goes to The Internet Archive.
I’m very happy to lose this bet.
When I made the original prediction eleven years ago that a URL on the longbets.org site would no longer be available, I did so in a spirit of mischief—it was a deliberately meta move. But it was also informed by a genuine feeling of pessimism around the longevity of links on the web. While that pessimism was misplaced in this case, it was informed by data.
The lifetime of a URL on the web remains shockingly short. What I think has changed in the intervening years is that people may have become more accustomed to the situation. People used to say “once something is online it’s there forever!”, which infuriated me because the real problem is the exact opposite: if you put something online, you have to put in real effort to keep it online. After all, we don’t really buy domain names; we just rent them. And if you publish on somebody else’s domain, you’re at their mercy: Geocities, MySpace, Facebook, Medium, Twitter.
These days my view towards the longevity of online content has landed somewhere in the middle of the two dangers. There’s a kind of Murphy’s Law around data online: anything that you hope will stick around will probably disappear and anything that you hope will disappear will probably stick around.
One huge change in the last eleven years that I didn’t anticipate is the migration of websites to HTTPS. The original URL of the prediction used HTTP. I’m glad to see that original URL now redirects to a more secure protocol. Just like most of the World Wide Web. I think we can thank Let’s Encrypt for that. But I think we can also thank Edward Snowden. We are no longer as innocent as we were eleven years ago.
I think if I could tell my past self that most of the web would using HTTPS by 2022, my past self would be very surprised …’though not as surprised at discovering that time travel had also apparently been invented.
The Internet Archive has also been a game-changer for digital preservation. While it’s less than ideal that something isn’t reachable at its original URL, knowing that there’s probably a copy of the content at archive.org lessens the sting considerably. I couldn’t be happier that this fine institution is the recipient of the stakes of this bet.