The Internet Is Rotting - The Atlantic
A terrific piece by Jonathan Zittrain on bitrot and online digital preservation:
Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.
unrot•link
Remy has turned his linkrot-battling technique into a service that you can use. He has more details on his blog.
Related links
No more 404
I really, really like the progressive enhancement approach that Remy is taking here with outbound links:
When a real user clicks on a link, it’s swapped out to be redirected through my own endpoint that checks if the URL is still OK, and if so permanently redirects the visitor, otherwise my endpoint checks the Web Archive for the URL and permanently redirects to that instead.
I think I’m going to do the same! I’d have to rewrite the server-side code in PHP, but that shouldn’t be too tricky.
This could a project for the next Indie Web Camp I attend.
Related posts
Hope
Hyperlinks are the things with feathers.