Re:Web Decay Graph
by raesene9 on Monday June 01, 2015 @07:03AM
(#9637734)
This is why for my own personal reasearch and archiving I moved from keeping "interesting links" to using a web clipper to take a copy of the page. Too many times I'd think "Oh there was an interesting article on that" to find it had gone, so now I take a copy of the article for later reference.
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Re:Web Decay Graph
by tenfingers on Monday June 01, 2015 @08:43AM
(#9638080)
I do the same. I never used bookmarks much, but when I did to remember rare findings, the website was already gone.
I now use 'save page as' (in Firefox I actually use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mozilla-archi...) all the time.
Unfortunately, JS-heavy pages might still perform delayed loading of resources which MAFF doesn't handle, which is one of the many reasons I truly hate how "modern web technologies" are abused.
That's very manual. If you're going to archive links, why not archive all URLs you visit (with a blacklist you occasionally update)? Disk space is cheap, and you can add in additional functionality like making a snapshot in the IA as well. I wrote my own simple daemon to do this after noting that far too often the IA had not captured a URL I needed on its own, and the daemon has worked well over the years: http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs
Pinboard can keep archives of bookmarked pages, and can also watch, say, your Twitter for new links.
But who will keep archives of pinboard?
Seriously, this approach will only shift the data from one unreliable online service to another one. Having decentralized offline copies of relevant information is much better. And maybe we will be able to come up with a mechanism to coordinate these decentralized backups, a la freenet [0]
I think Pinboard is deliberately aiming at changing less than most web sites, and he probably has better backups than I do for my own computers. Also, I have lots of devices, and it's nice to be able to save and access the archives from all of them.
Disclosure: I use the bookmarking there, not the archiving.