Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it

ascii.textfiles.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 41 posts

Re: Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it

#11

Post by walterbell »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #10
walterbell wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of other caches/archives (e.g. Google) applying the same retroactive policy? Presmably IA has no way of finding out that domain ownership has changed. I wonder if they are applying this policy to pages referenced by Wikipedia, http://blog.archive.org/2013/10/25/fixing-broken-links/ The safest archive of a web page is a local PDF.

> The safest archive of a web page is a local PDF. Minor quibble: The safest archive of a web page is a local WARC archive: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Wget_with_WARC_ou...

Good point, I would say both are needed. The WARC is only useful if there is a matching web browser and operating system in a VM which could render the HTML+Javascript and produce the original layout. PDF/A would mostly retain the browser layout.

Re: Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it

#12

Post by jsankey »

jmduke wrote: post #3

I've been thinking a lot the past few weeks about the preservation of art and goods in general. I think it comes from two main sources: 1. Maciej Ceglowski (`idlewords) has been talking a lot recently about link rot. Recently, he found that 25% of items pinned a mere five years ago were dead links and 17% from only three years ago were dead [^1]. That's an incredibly high rate -- and, selfishly, one I'm noticing as m…

> as my bookmark folders for recipes (RIP BroEats.com) and designs and other things is filled with more and more duds

If you'll forgive me the self-promoting diversion, this is one of the reasons I created my recipe manager app Zest (http://plentyofzest.com/zestapp/). It's frustrating to have a recipe move/disappear, so now I can collect them all in one place.

Re: Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it

#13

Post by wlesieutre »

jsankey wrote: post #12
jmduke wrote: post #3

I've been thinking a lot the past few weeks about the preservation of art and goods in general. I think it comes from two main sources: 1. Maciej Ceglowski (`idlewords) has been talking a lot recently about link rot. Recently, he found that 25% of items pinned a mere five years ago were dead links and 17% from only three years ago were dead [^1]. That's an incredibly high rate -- and, selfishly, one I'm noticing as m…

> as my bookmark folders for recipes (RIP BroEats.com) and designs and other things is filled with more and more duds If you'll forgive me the self-promoting diversion, this is one of the reasons I created my recipe manager app Zest ( http://plentyofzest.com/zestapp/ ). It's frustrating to have a recipe move/disappear, so now I can collect them all in one place.

Are they exportable for 15 years from now when Zest disappears?

Re: Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it

#14

Post by jsankey »

wlesieutre wrote: post #13
jsankey wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as my bookmark folders for recipes (RIP BroEats.com) and designs and other things is filled with more and more duds If you'll forgive me the self-promoting diversion, this is one of the reasons I created my recipe manager app Zest ( http://plentyofzest.com/zestapp/ ). It's frustrating to have a recipe move/disappear, so now I can collect them all in one place.

Are they exportable for 15 years from now when Zest disappears?

Excellent question and this is on our roadmap (yes, I know, vapourware until we ship it). The plan is to export as HTML with standard microdata annotations (the same we use to automatically import). That should be fairly durable, as far as formats go, and even if the HTML dies at least it is structured (for conversion to a new format) and text-based (at worst you can still read the source).

Re: Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it

#15

Post by stevekemp »

rdtsc wrote: post #2

Ah ZX Spectrum that takes me back. I learned assembler on it, BASIC, had a Pascal and C compiler even (the last two had to load from tape). Made one mistake and had to reload the whole thing again and wait 5 minutes or so. It was amazing how there was this closeness to the machine, you boot right into the programming environment and had to type a command to load a game or do anything. Some of the games I remember wer…

I got into programming after receiving a 48k spectrum for Chrismas as a child, which arrived with a broken tape deck.

No "Hungry Horace" for me, instead it was the (very readable) manual to work through. Happily z80 machine code prepared me well for Intel assembly.

Even now I play chaos every month or two: http://torinak.com/qaop#!chaos along with a couple of other games.

Re: Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it

#16

Post by ggreer »

ijk wrote: post #5
jmduke wrote: post #3

I've been thinking a lot the past few weeks about the preservation of art and goods in general. I think it comes from two main sources: 1. Maciej Ceglowski (`idlewords) has been talking a lot recently about link rot. Recently, he found that 25% of items pinned a mere five years ago were dead links and 17% from only three years ago were dead [^1]. That's an incredibly high rate -- and, selfishly, one I'm noticing as m…

> The nice things about IA links is you can pretty reasonably assume that they won't suffer from link rot, right? The catch there being, the Internet Archive retroactively respects robots.txt that forbid crawling, so if someone gets control of a domain they can block the archived pages. This is a big problem with lapsed domains that get swept under the umbrella of a holding company that has lots of domains pointing t…

This is a huge problem. Sites like NASA's NTRS are retroactively blocked.[1] It's not clear which user agents one must allow in robots.txt. NTRS allows archive.org_bot, but apparently ia_archiver is also needed. At some point the allow directive in the NTRS robots.txt[2] no longer matched, nuking all historical data.

1. See http://web.archive.org/web/20121029225832/http://ntrs.nasa.g... for an example.

2. http://ntrs.nasa.gov/robots.txt

Re: Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it

#17

Post by mwill »

Jason Scott in general is one of my internet heroes. A lot of what he covers in his work is before my time, so it doesn't carry any nostalgia for me, but appeals on a different level altogether.

Books I've read, and classes I took in school, covered the history of the net and computers, but only the things that they feel is 'important', you get the overview of the evolution of programming languages, history of the computer, and timeline of the internet and world wide web. In each case, it feels like it's all about linking one big advancement to the next big advancement.

What you get from Jason's documentaries and presentations and sites however, is this really raw and honest look at what real people were actually doing at the time. It's hard to explain why that feels so important to me, but it does.

Re: Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it

#18

Post by micah63 »

Man, I've been looking for the name of a Sega Genesis game for a long time and couldn't remember it. I just saw it on your site. "Atomic Rob-Kid" was one of the best games I've ever played. Super hard and super frustrating, but it has a great feel!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/14811059366/in/set-7...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Robo-Kid

Re: Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it

#19

Post by mulletboy »

mwill wrote: post #17

Jason Scott in general is one of my internet heroes. A lot of what he covers in his work is before my time, so it doesn't carry any nostalgia for me, but appeals on a different level altogether. Books I've read, and classes I took in school, covered the history of the net and computers, but only the things that they feel is 'important', you get the overview of the evolution of programming languages, history of the co…

If you're interested in the history of the Web and its inception, I highly recommend you this (non-technical) reading [1] by Tim Berners Lee. Really inspiring.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny/...

Re: Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it

#20

Post by jacquesm »

jmduke wrote: post #3

I've been thinking a lot the past few weeks about the preservation of art and goods in general. I think it comes from two main sources: 1. Maciej Ceglowski (`idlewords) has been talking a lot recently about link rot. Recently, he found that 25% of items pinned a mere five years ago were dead links and 17% from only three years ago were dead [^1]. That's an incredibly high rate -- and, selfishly, one I'm noticing as m…

I have a few one-off remaining records and I'm very conscious of the responsibility that goes with that. I've never played them and the only time they will be played is when there is a very high grade digitization done at the same time. I've been looking at ways to digitize them without having to actually mechanically play them (using lasers) but those systems are expensive! (http://www.elpj.com/product/price.php)
Post reply on HN