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#archiving

2 posts2 participants0 posts today

"This destruction reveals not only the brutality of war, but also a long-standing neglect of the importance of digital archiving and the use of technical advances to preserve documents and archives. This neglect threatens to lose a history that could have been documented for the present and built upon for the future."

dabangasudan.org/en/all-news/a

Dabanga Radio TV Online · As the world celebrates Artificial Intelligence, Sudanese journalism loses memory in war - Dabanga Radio TV OnlinePrepared by Al-Alaq Centre for Press Services for Sudan Media Forum As the world moves...

New Kitten Release 🥳

• Implements cascading archives support

kitten.small-web.org/reference

Cascading archives¹ is useful if you have a static archive of the old version of your site and you don’t want to host it somewhere else and use the 404→307 (evergreen web) technique (kitten.small-web.org/reference) (the latter is useful if the old version of your site is a dynamic site and you cannot take a static archive of it).

If a URL cannot be found on your app, Kitten will trying it in the archive folders:

__archive__1
__archive__2
__archive__3

(In that order.)

So you can three older static versions of your site served without breaking older URLs unless they are shadowed by newer URLs in your site/app.

Enjoy!

:kitten:💕

¹ This is a feature that I originally implemented in Site.js (that’s going to be shut down tomorrow when Let’s Encrypt stops issuing certificates with OCSP-stapling – I don’t have the bandwidth to maintain two servers/frameworks; Kitten is Site.js’s successor). I’m planning on implementing this differently in Kitten going forward (so you can use the Settings interface to upload a zipped archive and it will serve it) but I need this for my own site for tomorrow’s shutdown so we have this simpler implementation in the meanwhile. Leaving things to the last minute? Who? Me? Never! ;)

Ooh, what’s this?… Look Over There!
(With apologies to Jaida Essence Hall)

So the little app I teased earlier is ready and deployed and I have our own instance running at:

look-over-there.small-web.org

Look Over There! lets you forward multiple domains to different URLs with full HTTPS support.

Why?

We have a number of older sites that are becoming a chore/expensive to maintain and yet I don’t want to break the web. So I thought, hey, I’ll just use the “url forwarding” feature of my domain registrar to forward them to their archived versions on archive.org.

Ah, not so fast, young cricket… seems some domain registrars’ implementations of this feature do not work if the domain being forwarded is accessed via HTTPS (yes, in 2025).

So, given Kitten¹ uses Auto Encrypt² to automatically provision Let’s Encrypt certificates, I added a domain forwarding feature to it and created Look Over There! as a friendly/simple app that provides a visual interface to it.

To see it in action, hit cleanuptheweb.org and you should get forwarded to the archived version of it on archive.org. I’m going to be adding more of our sites to the list in the coming days as part of an effort to reduce my maintenance load and cut down our expenses at Small Technology Foundation.

Since it’s Small Web, this particular instance is just for us. However, you can run your own copy on a VPS (or even a little single-board computer at home, etc.) A link to the source code repository is on the site. Once Domain³ is ready for use (later this year 🤞), setting up your own instance of a Small Web app at your own server will take less than a minute.

I hope this little tool, along with the 404→307 (evergreen web) technique⁴, helps us to nurture an evergreen web and avoid link rot. (And the source code, as little as there is because Kitten does so much for you, is a good resource if you want to learn about Kitten’s new class-based component and page model which I haven’t yet had a chance to properly document.)

Enjoy!

:kitten:💕

¹ kitten.small-web.org
² codeberg.org/small-tech/auto-e
³ codeberg.org/domain/app
4042307.org

If you've been following me for a bit you've probably seen me post archiving resources, which are even more important than usual lately as websites & datasets get disappeared off of US federal computer networks. There is an impressive array of efforts, new and old, to preserve things and keep them available.

I was hoping to find a website which has them all organized in one place, and I have! (Note: It's way broader than the stated "Social Sciences") libguides.brown.edu/socscidata #archive #archiving

libguides.brown.eduLibGuides: Social Sciences Data Resources: Alternate US Data SourcesResources, tools and tops for finding and managing data across the social sciences. Back-ups and alternative sources for US government data

I’m going through our events page on the Small Technology Foundation web site¹ and porting the entries there to the new version of our web site that I’m building in Kitten² and it’s depressing how many event sites have just disappeared.

Thank goodness for archive.org.

¹ small-tech.org
² kitten.small-web.org

Small Technology FoundationHomeHello! We’re a tiny and independent two-person not-for-profit based in Ireland. We are building the Small Web. No, it’s not web3, it’s web0.

I am still able to read images and source code stored on CD-RW over 20 years ago. If not abused, hard drives can also last that long, although their mechanical complexity makes it more likely that something will fail. SSDs are definitely no good for long term storage, and USB thumb drives are similar.

So if you want the Deep Future to know about something digital then archive grade DVD, or CD-R, or just printing a hard copy on archival acid-free paper is about as good as it gets.

There are many reasons to archive stuff, and we are in a time where things such as scientific data or books on certain topics are at risk of being disappeared from official availability.

#archiving

This thread is going to be a bit of a whiny rant, so if you're not up for that kind of thing, best skip it.
A couple months ago a call went out on the interwebz from a researcher worried that the government data his research depended on, many terabytes, might be taken down. He asked people to help him download it as quickly as possible, after which he said he would set up a new centralized location for them to upload it to for permanent storage.
#SafeguardingResearch #archiving
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image: canva

#archivematters #collect #preserve #remember #archiv #archiving #archivarbeit #inventarisieren #ordnen #art #artcollection #kunstsammlung #büchersammlung #literatur #fotografie #brugg #switzerland #dachregion

Vanishing Culture: Preserving the #Library System
blog.archive.org/2025/04/07/va
Based on a simple but catastrophic business decision, the big #publishers are making it impossible for libraries to do their core functions of preservation and enduring access in the digital era. #Netflix, for instance, recently changed its terms of service to explicitly prohibit #archiving, therefore allowing them to remove or change any movie for all subscribers at once
#conservation
#archive

blog.archive.orgVanishing Culture: Preserving the Library System | Internet Archive Blogs

I've mirrored a relatively simple website (redsails.org; it's mostly text, some images) for posterity via #wget. However, I also wanted to grab snapshots of any outlinks (of which there are many, as citations/references). By default, I couldn't figure out a configuration where wget would do that out of the box, without endlessly, recursively spidering the whole internet. I ended up making a kind-of poor man's #ArchiveBox instead:

for i in $(cat others.txt) ; do dirname=$(echo "$i" | sha256sum | cut -d' ' -f 1) ; mkdir -p $dirname ; wget --span-hosts --page-requisites --convert-links --backup-converted --adjust-extension --tries=5 --warc-file="$dirname/$dirname" --execute robots=off --wait 1 --waitretry 5 --timeout 60 -o "$dirname/wget-$dirname.log" --directory-prefix="$dirname/" $i ; done

Basically, there's a list of bookmarks^W URLs in others.txt that I grabbed from the initial mirror of the website with some #grep foo. I want to do as good of a mirror/snapshot of each specific URL as I can, without spidering/mirroring endlessly all over. So, I hash the URL, and kick off a specific wget job for it that will span hosts, but only for the purposes of making the specific URL as usable locally/offline as possible. I know from experience that this isn't perfect. But... it'll be good enough for my purposes. I'm also stashing a WARC file. Probably a bit overkill, but I figure it might be nice to have.