The days of lamenting linkrot seem quaint and prosaic. Right now, as I type, the world is witnessing the wholesale strip mine clearcutting of the web for the ego-flexing kicks of the lunatic in charge.
Not many of us can do much as individuals (besides feel the musky stench weight) but luckily many Good People are doing the archival heroism. I have only here a nifty little trick I came across should you have a need to do one click, one off, archiving of any web page. It’s not mega archiver, just a little one for small scale.
I’d bookmarked it long ago in my Piinboard cooltech collection (speaking of archving, thanks to the Pinboarder in Chief for enabling my tag links to be public again!)- I’m talking about archive.today, a rather plain looking, like maybe a 1990s web page, but do not be deceived. A powerful machine sits below it.
Mostly I sit in article sharing, as a paywall skirter. Paywalls, subscription walls on the web make me ANGRY, and I loathe following a link to something that looks useful and slamming my brain on The Wall. There’s lots of offenders, but the worst IMHO was once the hippest internet tech magazine, one worth buying in print form. I am talking Wired magazine, which now in its later year grants you, the humble web citizen, ONE FREE VIEW per month! That kind of generosity is…. beyond Expired.
I have noticed that maybe one of my favorite authors I first read there and still follow on Mastodon (plus email newsletter) is Clive Thompson. I noticed tonight in a post that he offered a link to a timely Wired story (not linked it’s $wall) on the Evil Dark Lord of Twitter Now With His Fingers in The Government Files. F**** another no read wall. But Clive always shares an “unpaywalled link” and that one is easier to get to than the Wayback Machine method I ranted on.
I’d glanced at archive.today last June when I bookmarked it, but felt like wandering around bit. Look at this, about as unflashy as you can get. Where’s all the slickness of Reactified web scrolly widgety pages?
That’s my thing is to dig around a web site to learn more about what else it does, see if the FAQ is really FA, who does it, what kind of human presence they have (bonus points for sarcasm and super bonus points for hidden messages when I view source).
It was the bottom search that got my prying– it’s a way to search what has been archived, as shared, the urls tell you nothing really about them, e.g. https://archive.ph/VJMq1
But check this out, by trying one of their searches, I can find find every single Wired URL someone has clicked the button to archive, that anyone can navigate to the way Sir TBL intended, just click a link and read. No greedy gate agent. Just putting the domain in the searchbox, I have free access to over 1500 Wired articles
Again, it pays to be a reader of web addresses, seeing this link is https://archive.ph/wired.com I can just immediately do a vanity check, how many web pages from my own blog are in there? Zero? I just go directly to https://archive.ph/cogdogblog.com to take in maybe 18 blog posts, so nothing to be that excited about.
The fun part is further down the scroll, as there are snapshots in the older themes the blog once wore, like this archive to the 2013 era with a theme based on Welite and the design from 2009 on the hOPe theme before that.
The wild thing is that I have no idea why someone out there archived these snapshots. That;s really interesting. The act of archiving is anonymous.
Again, this is by no means a way to do a full archive of your site, but there might be key URLs you want to have a fully web functioning snapshot. Or you could just do the web a favor and random anything you see that looks worth at least slipping into the open vault.
This is really just that kind of the corner of the web, far from the limelight of major sites where Stuff Trends, but this is almost like the brainchild of a single person. I have no idea who does this or why (there are definitely signs of a persona in the FAQ).
It’s the low tech look in something that is a powerful tool to have in your web pocket.
Featured Image: I recently came across this nifty old gadget that my father-in-law clipped to his life vest when doing canoe adventures on Saskatechewan rivers. My original photo 2025/365/4 The Coghlan Multi-Tool flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) was more vertical than horizontal for a featured image. I admit here I used the Generative Fill of Photoshop to extend the sides of the wood table. I guess I AI-ed.
