Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a business idea in there somewhere. Some kind of CDN-edge-archive hybrid.
“CDN-Whether-You-Want-It-Or-Not”
Foreverspin meets Cloudflare
Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
91–100 of 262 posts
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#92Link rot has convinced me that the web is not good for its ostensible purpose. I used to roll my eyes reading how academic researchers and librarians would discourage using webpages as resources. Many years later, it's obvious that the web is pretty bad for anything that isn't ephemeral.
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#93You can create a bookmark in Firefox to save a link quickly. Bookmark Location- https://web.archive.org/save/%s Keyword - save So searching 'save https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24406193 ' archives this post. You can use any Keyword instead of 'save'. You can also search with https://web.archive.org/*/%s
Does that `save` keyword work?
The problem is %s gets escaped, so Firefox generates this URL, which seems to be invalid:
https://web.archive.org/save/https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator....
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#94I'm not sure I'm a fan of this because it just turns WayBackMachine into another content silo. It's called the world wide web for a reason, and this isn't helping. I can see it for corporate sites where they change content, remove pages, and break links without a moment's consideration. But for my personal site, for example, I'd much rather you link to me directly rather than content in WayBackMachine. Apart from any…
yeah at some point, way back machine need to be on webttorrent, ipfs type of thing where it is immutable.
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#95I'm not sure I'm a fan of this because it just turns WayBackMachine into another content silo. It's called the world wide web for a reason, and this isn't helping. I can see it for corporate sites where they change content, remove pages, and break links without a moment's consideration. But for my personal site, for example, I'd much rather you link to me directly rather than content in WayBackMachine. Apart from any…
Gwern.net has a pretty sophisticated system for this https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#96Link rot has convinced me that the web is not good for its ostensible purpose. I used to roll my eyes reading how academic researchers and librarians would discourage using webpages as resources. Many years later, it's obvious that the web is pretty bad for anything that isn't ephemeral.
>I used to roll my eyes reading how academic researchers and librarians would discourage using webpages as resources.
While this is true in general, I am amused that this is not true for citing wikipedia. Wikipedia can be trusted to remain online for many more years to come. And it has a built-in wayback machine in the form of Revision History.
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#97I'm not sure I'm a fan of this because it just turns WayBackMachine into another content silo. It's called the world wide web for a reason, and this isn't helping. I can see it for corporate sites where they change content, remove pages, and break links without a moment's consideration. But for my personal site, for example, I'd much rather you link to me directly rather than content in WayBackMachine. Apart from any…
I use linkchecker for this on my personal sites:
https://linkchecker.github.io/linkchecker/
There's a similar NodeJS program called blcl (broken-link-checker-local) which has the handy attribute that it works on local directories, making it particularly easy to use with static websites before deploying them.
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#98WBM is like a content snapshot. You can't go back in time and change anything. That's why it is better than linking to the original.
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#99The idea of being able to access the URL once it is gone is good. However this also means that any updates made to the original page are no longer seen.
Not all updates are about "begging for money" as the example in the article.
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#100I understand where the author is coming from, but I think the best approach is to write your content with direct links to the canonical versions of articles.
Have a link checking process you run regularly against your site, using some of the standard tools I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/broken-link-checker-local
https://linkchecker.github.io/linkchecker/
When you run the link check (which should be regularly, perhaps at least weekly), also run a process that harvests the non-local links from your site and 1) adds any new links' content to your own local, unpublished archive of external content, and 2) submits those new links to archive.org.
This keeps canonical URLs canonical, makes sure content you've linked to is backed up on archive.org so a reasonably trustworthy source is available should the canonical one die out, and gives you your own backup in case archive.org and the original both vanish.
I don't currently do this with my own sites, but now I'm questioning why not. I already have the regular link checks, and the second half seems pretty straightforward to add (for static sites, anyway).