231–240 of 458 posts
"In the beginning of the 21st century people suddenly stopped reading and writing. In the short timespan of only a few decades almost all form of written communication has vanished..."
>I don't even know any web applications that have remained similarly functioning over 10 years HN is a good candidate to be included in his example, it's been the same for 12 years?
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was what made me convert from bookmarking to clipping pages into Evernote around 6-7 years ago. I realized I had this huge archive of reference bookmarks that were almost useless because 1) I could rarely find what I was looking for, if I even remembered I'd bookmarked something in the first place, and 2) if I did, it was likely gone anyway. With Evernote I can full text search anything I've clipped in the past…
Shout out to https://joplinapp.org/ I was an Evernote user when I was on macOS. When I switched to Linux, a proper web clipper was something I really missed. I'm now on Joplin and it does everything I used to use Evernote for and then some. It even has vim bindings now! As far as longevity goes, I think they got their archive / backup format right - it's just a tarball with markdown in it.
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…
I didn't perceive the author to be doing any technical gatekeeping, quite the opposite. I feel like their article was targeted at people like me or others who use stuff like Hugo/Jekyll, or those who use free website builders or use large frameworks for simple websites. I agree a couple of the points seem out of place (the monitoring service one made me laugh. visiting my website is the first thing I do after uploadi…
I think what you want is not just monitoring your internal links, but also external ones - if a page you linked to in your article starts 404-ing or otherwise changes significantly, it's something you'd likely want to know about. That said, just like preferring GoAccess over Google Analytics, it's something I'd like to have running locally somewhere (on my server, or even on my desktop), instead of having to sign up to some third-party service.
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Repo hosts are quite vulnerable to storage abuse as well as simply accruing genuine old content. I can see a deletion heuristic that considers both account activity and repo activity being deployed within the next 10 years. However I expect another evolution in SCM in the same timeframe.
Right, look at SourceForge. There's a lot of broken links and/or references to no-longer accessible content in some of the older Apache.org projects too. Also maybe cvs/svn/git repo generally don't contain content worth preserving for 100 years. There are some historically significant or interesting repos, but for the most part you'll have a bunch of unremarkable (and duplicated) code that may not have run then and c…
100 years is a long time, but I do run 20+ years old Common Lisp libraries and expect them to work without modification; I'd be really pissed if they disappeared from the Internet because someone thought that 5 years of inactivity means something doesn't work anymore.
> (4) End all forms of hotlinking
Any advice on what to do if you want to embed videos?
Bandwidth can cost a lot (maybe I'm wrong?) and AFAIK Cloudflare doesn't cache videos.
I would stick with Vimeo, but they can delete your videos if over threshold after you stop paying. YouTube at this point is sadly a better bet if you want to maintain a low cost website for decades.
Any alternatives I'm missing?
I think using a static site generator might be OK. Common headers and footers help, and RSS might definitely be a good thing, but that seems to be dying.
One idea from this article I liked was "one page, over many". I don't think he meant have one single page on your website, but rather one per directory, and like he has with this article have one directory for a thought or essay or piece of something you want documenting, and just have an index.html in it.
I like this because I think the one thing that has killed off most personal websites is not the tech tool chain, but that "blogging" created an expectation of everybody becoming a constant content creator. The pressure to create content and for it to potentially "go viral" is one of several reasons I just tore down several sites over the years.
Around this time of year I take a break from work and think about my various side projects, and sometimes think about "starting a blog again". I often spend a few hours fiddling with Jekyll or Hugo, both good tools. Then I sit and think about the relentless pressure to add content to this "thing".
I like this idea instead though. No blogs. No constant "hot takes" or pressure to produce content all the time. Just build a slowly growing, curated, hand-rolled website.
I still think there might be a utility in having a static site build flow with a template function, but a simple enough design could be updated with nothing more than CSS.
Bit to think about, here... interesting.
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…
This problem has been solved a long time ago if you use Pinboard. https://pinboard.in/ Just pay the yearly subscription so pinboard can cache your bookmarks.