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Open Source The Internet

Link Rot Rx: 'Amber' Add-on For WordPress and Drupal 17

David Rothman writes: If you run a WordPress or Drupal site, you can now fight link rot with Amber, a new open source add-on from Harvard's Berkman Center. If links are dead, visitors can still summon up the pages as stored on your server or, if you prefer, outside ones such as the Internet Archive. TeleRead has the details, and the Amber site is here, with download information.
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Link Rot Rx: 'Amber' Add-on For WordPress and Drupal

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  • let's store the Internet...

  • The last link is a nice touch.

  • On one hand, there's a lot of content in the IA that would have vanished forever if not for their help. On the other hand, I can't access my old content, if they even have it, because the current owner of the domain has configured their robots.txt such that they won't permit me to have it back. If a site goes down, it's highly likely that the new site will get a robots.txt that does not permit archiving, and you won't be able to access the links anyway... because rarely does a domain actually ever go away. Usually, it gets parked and farmed.

    • One of the Mysteries of the Universe has the very simple and generic name, "women". Others exist, too. In the future a new one will be added, something like, "If the Internet remembers everything, then why do links go bad?"
    • Are there not 'evil' crawlers which ignore robots.txt, serving the public interest? That is a kind of disappointing.
  • Any website CMS that allows you to specify the JavaScripts you run could use a similar tool "Robustify.js" (https://github.com/renevoorburg/robustify.js), except for that it doesn't archive itself but relies on other web archiving services to have done that for you.

    With Robustify.js, if a user hits a links that returns a 404, the user will be redirected using the Memento-protocol to a webarchive that does have a copy.

    René

  • Go ahead and look for Sirius tuner RS232 information online.... most of the links are dead-dead. having non dead links on your site by caching the information is a good idea because your content does not go irrelevant when someone shuts down their freebie page because they got bored.

The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else doing it wrong, without commenting. -- T.H. White

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