Paul Jacobson

Life and its many opportunities

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Quietly preserve your WordPress site with the Internet Archive Wayback Machine

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Link rot is a growing problem on the Web. It is what happens as the Web ages and sites disappear. At some point posts or pages that you have linked to from your site no longer load because the site has been taken down or the URL changed. Or, worse, your posts and pages are no longer accessible because something has happened to your site.

Initiatives like this are important to the health of the open Web because they preserve more of the Web for our future benefit. I like this quote from Alexander Rose at Automattic:

It’s very important that websites have a memory and that the web overall as has a memory. We are increasingly using [the web] as our only source of truth. When links go dead, in effect, the truth goes dead. This has become even more important in the world of AI.

One way to combat this is to install the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer plugin on your WordPress site and let it quietly run in the background, essentially backing up your site to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, preserving it for future readers and researchers.

Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com and where I work) and the Internet Archive have collaborated on a new release of this plugin:

Link rot. There’s nothing quite as frustrating as clicking on a link that leads to nowhere.

WordPress, which powers more than 40% of websites online, recently partnered with the Internet Archive to address this problem. Engineers from the Internet Archive and Automattic worked together to create a plugin that can be added to a WordPress website to improve the user experience and check the Wayback Machine for an archived version of any webpage that has been moved, changed or taken down.

The free Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer, publicly launched last fall, combats link rot by seamlessly redirecting the user to a reliable backup page when it encounters a missing page. When the plugin is added to a website, it will do a scan, see what pages exist, and then automatically save those pages to a queue to be archived. If it doesn’t exist, then it will be sent for capture.

The plugin is free and you can find it here: Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer – WordPress plugin.

Fediverse Reactions

3 responses

  1. hamish campbell avatar
    hamish campbell

    @Paul I am giving this plugin a go… let's see.

    1. Paul avatar
      Paul

      I’ve had it running on my site and it seems to be working fairly well.

      Reply
      1. hamish campbell avatar
        hamish campbell

        @geekygirldawn a post on the subject https://hamishcampbell.com/why-mainstream-eu-tech-funding-needs-counter-currents-why-tech-activism-matters/

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