Archivebox

Speaking of longevi­ty on the web, here’s some nifty open source soft­ware for rolling your own Internet Archive. Archivebox saves URL snap­shots in sev­er­al for­mats: HTML, PDF, PNG, WARC, and more. It can extract a wide vari­ety of con­tent to pre­serve — arti­cle text, audio/video, git repos, etc. You can feed it URLs one at a time, sched­ule reg­u­lar imports from brows­er book­marks or his­to­ry, use feeds from RSS, con­nect book­mark ser­vices like Pocket/Pinboard, and more. Take that link rot!

The bal­ance between the per­ma­nence and ephemer­al nature of con­tent on the inter­net is part of what makes it beau­ti­ful. I don’t think every­thing should be pre­served in an auto­mat­ed fashion–making all con­tent per­ma­nent and never remov­able, but I do think peo­ple should be able to decide for them­selves and effec­tive­ly archive spe­cif­ic con­tent that they care about.

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