Archive.org, Linkrot, and You

March 7, 2022 2:59 PM

PSA: The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is a fantastic resource for finding preserved copies of broken links from long-lost websites. But did you know you can now have it archive pages on demand -- including copies of all the pages that page links to?

This has been a boon for me, as a lot of my posts are evergreen collections of resources from around the web and those dozens (or hundreds) of links are easily susceptible to linkrot over time. Now I can plug a finished post into the Wayback Machine and have snapshots of everything saved in one click! I encourage everybody to do the same with posts they write or enjoy and help prevent dead links from spoiling their usefulness.

posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter-Related at 2:59 PM (10 comments total)

PS: My attempt to do a post-per-day in February for #DoublesJubilee stalled out at the tail end due to surprise jury duty (and accidentally becoming a PR liaison for the Ukrainian government), but I did still have some old-n-busted posts I wanted to update and save -- hopefully it's not uncouth to do some more outside of February proper!
posted by Rhaomi at 3:19 PM on March 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Oh I wish I'd known about this before Goodreads lost nine years of my book reviews. The Wayback machine had a little of it but frustratingly little and hard to find. Ironically the one review I was able to recover in full from it was because I'd linked it on Metafilter.
posted by Nelson at 4:11 PM on March 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

That's cool. I wonder, can it be automated?
posted by rebent at 5:36 PM on March 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I found this the other day (then remembered I'd seen someone mention it here recently) when looking for a non-paywalled copy of an article linked here. It's not exactly instant (demand-driven delay, I guess), but is a wonderful resource :-)
posted by dg at 5:42 PM on March 7, 2022

Very cool!
posted by ellieBOA at 12:43 AM on March 8, 2022

I wonder if a site like MetaFilter could submit a site automatically? Or even if the two could be linked somehow?
posted by svenni at 9:27 AM on March 8, 2022

Svenni, that sounds like a great idea in the making and I bet Jason Scott would be up for a collaboration. I know him as a cool dude, and he loves the old school web.
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:03 PM on March 8, 2022

I love the Internet Archive dearly!

Nelson: huh, I'd seen your post, but you have comments off on your blog. I think someone crawled all the public reviews around 2020? I'll see if I can find that again.

Somewhere on my todo list is making a Wayback Machine just for links from MetaFilter.
posted by Pronoiac at 2:05 AM on March 9, 2022

Step one: auto archive every existing and future metafilter post's links
Step two: make a list of high-quality metafilter posts on a certain topic, e.g. Radiohead
Step three: post that list to metafilter
posted by rebent at 6:02 PM on March 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I misremembered - I think they crawled the reviews in 2019. You might want to explore that?
posted by Pronoiac at 1:26 AM on March 10, 2022