I really enjoyed this episode of The Talk Show with guest Jason Kottke. Their talk of 404 links after years (and decades!) of blogging inspired me to expand our archiver in Micro.blog to make it easier to preserve a copy of web pages you link to. I recorded a YouTube video with the details.
@manton That sounds like a very interesting and useful approach. You must need to limit it to web pages though and exclude links to audio and video or your hosting costs would spiral out of control…
@Miraz Thanks. Yes, it skips audio and video. Only HTML, CSS, and images are archived. I'm thinking for video maybe we lean on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Not sure.
@manton this is really cool, makes me want to upgrade so I can use it.
One cool way to expose it would be for theming - perhaps some themes could offer an automatic archive link. Not appropriate for all blogs and not by default, but available.
Something I did recently was make a shrine to privacy on the web, and I used a Hugo shirt code to provide links to .onion domains alongside clear text sites. That implementation is really just a prototype and has lots of room for improvement, but something similar might be nice for some blogs to automatically show the archive alongside the live link.
@micahrl Thanks! Interesting idea integrating it with themes somehow. Will have to think about that.
@manton that archive feature is *really* cool. It’d be neat if Micro.blog could check for dead links every so often then prompt: “12 links died last month, want to fix that?” And boom. Magic.
Curious, is it expensive hosting all those archived posts?
@haglund I like that idea of an ocasional notification. It does add some costs which is why for now it’s only enabled at our Premium hosting level.
@manton That is a very neat idea!! I actually did something similar manually on my Stuff I Use page, where some of the links are from archive.ph instead of the actual product link as these tend to go away very often. I wanted to do one for my bicycle too, but the page was terrible when archiving due to some JS code.
@manton This is a fantastic idea, as long as I can assuage the guilt associated with additional storage costs.
