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This Page is Designed to Last

jeffhuang.com

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Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#151

Post by marc_io »

winfred wrote: post #135
whack wrote: post #124

Let's be honest with ourselves. The best way to make your content last for a long time is to host it on a platform that is free and very successful. For example, whatever photos I posted on Facebook 12 years ago? Still alive and kicking. The articles I've published on wordpress.com 7 years ago? Still in mint condition, with 0 maintenance required. In comparison, the websites that I've built and hosted or deployed mys…

>Let's be honest with ourselves. The best way to make your content last for a long time is to host it on a platform that is free and very successful. For example, whatever photos I posted on Facebook 12 years ago? Still alive and kicking. The articles I've published on wordpress.com 7 years ago? Still in mint condition, with 0 maintenance required. You view on timeline is too short. We're not talking about keeping so…

You can export your WordPress website to static HTML easily with the help of a free plugin.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#152

Post by incompatible »

mark242 wrote: post #14

I fundamentally agree with the principle -- that pages should be designed to survive a long time -- however the steps the author lays out I completely disagree with. "The more libraries incorporated into the website, the more fragile it becomes" is just fundamentally untrue in a world where you're self-hosting all of your scripts. "Prefer one page over several" is diametrically opposed to the hypertext model. Please…

: "in a world where you're self-hosting all of your scripts."

Anything self-hosted is already fragile: it will go away when you don't continue to actively maintain it (paying for a domain, keeping a computer connected to the Internet etc.) or when you die.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#153

Post by lioeters »

saagarjha wrote: post #24

I've put a bit of thought of what'll happen to my website if I were to die. It's hosted on GitHub Pages right now, so at some point GitHub is going to disappear or stop offering the service. Even before that, I honestly don't know what happens to renewing payments–I guess my Google Domains payment will stop and somebody will squat on my domain soon after? archive.org might be the only thing keeping the information ar…

I recently learned about GitHub Archive, which plans to last "at least 1,000 years".

https://archiveprogram.github.com/

It's specifically for open source software, but I wonder if it can be spun out into personal archives or websites.

---

Some years ago, I had an idea for a thought experiment called the Eternal Bit - various angles on the practicality of preserving a bit state "forever".

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#155

Post by 3xblah »

shasheene wrote: post #7

There's no reason why a web browser bookmark action doesn't automatically create a WARC (web archive) format. Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic. Imagine having the last 30 years of web browsing history saved on your local machine. This would especially be useful when in research mode and deep diving a topic. [1] https://github.com…

"Imagine having the last 30 years of web browsing history saved on your local machine."

I believe the name for that experience was/is "Microsoft Windows".

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#156

Post by inimino »

Loranubi wrote: post #131

I am all for archiving important web content, but imo most of the web content is not important and impossible to archive anyway. Too many pages use dynamic content which make web archives useless. Also having too much data just dilutes the useful stuff. If you have useful content (the author should) store it in some other way. Put articles in any simple markup format like markdown in git, distribute videos using torr…

There are still orders of magnitude more pages of HTML than Markdown, so if you're interested in archival, just store simple HTML. I'd say HTML has a good chance of being interpretable a thousand years from now.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#157

Post by shapov »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #93
notatoad wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Use whatever typography you want, so long as you self host the woff files. or use Google Web fonts, and set let last option in your font-family to be "serif" or "sans-serif" to let an appropriate typeface be used if your third-party font is unreachable. That's the beauty of text, the content should still be readable even if your desired font is unavailable.

Google Web Fonts are not an "or", here. Fonts have disappeared from it, and there is no reason to not expect Google to, at some point in the future, go: "you know what, this costs too much without any substantial return." And now it's just another killedbygoogle.com product. Just like images, self-hosting woff/woff2 should be step 1.

Fonts disappearing is not a big issue that will ultimately render your page useless. If the font is gone, the look of the page is slightly affected, but the content of the page remains. It's honestly not a big deal at all.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#158

Post by btrettel »

shasheene wrote: post #7

There's no reason why a web browser bookmark action doesn't automatically create a WARC (web archive) format. Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic. Imagine having the last 30 years of web browsing history saved on your local machine. This would especially be useful when in research mode and deep diving a topic. [1] https://github.com…

Years ago I used the old Firefox addon Shelve to automatically archive the vast majority of web pages I visited.

http://shelve.sourceforge.net/

The main disadvantage was disk space. This is particularly true when some pages are 10 MB or larger. I would periodically prune the archive directory for this reason.

I stopped using Shelve when I started running out of disk space, and now I can't use Shelve because the addon is no longer supported. The author of Shelve has some suggestions for software with similar functionality:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/shelve-firefox-addon...

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#159

Post by Normal_gaussian »

incompatible wrote: post #152
mark242 wrote: post #14

I fundamentally agree with the principle -- that pages should be designed to survive a long time -- however the steps the author lays out I completely disagree with. "The more libraries incorporated into the website, the more fragile it becomes" is just fundamentally untrue in a world where you're self-hosting all of your scripts. "Prefer one page over several" is diametrically opposed to the hypertext model. Please…

: "in a world where you're self-hosting all of your scripts." Anything self-hosted is already fragile: it will go away when you don't continue to actively maintain it (paying for a domain, keeping a computer connected to the Internet etc.) or when you die.

I've outlived and outhosted all of the third party hosts I've used.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#160

Post by jerezzprime »

I'm confused about the widely held opinion that it is paramount that all web content persist for infinity. That seems parallel to someone expecting my personal handwritten journal to be archived and available to all of future humanity. I'm not convinced that is a positive thing, nor is it a necessary thing. How egotistical do you need to be to think that your personal blog is worth persisting forever?
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