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

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.

Comments

let's store the Internet

[stooo]

let's store the Internet...

Re:let's store the Internet

[Trax3001BBS]

yeah, like why would netflix want to set up servers all over the world and redundantly duplicate all of their content over and over...

LOL, 7 years on the UseNet with a separate handle, I have over 100K (Google) hits on it and run into myself all the time.
Understand UseNet only, I never posted on a .COM, .NET, or .ORG site yet that's where all of my post are showing up at.

Re:let's store the Internet

[i.r.id10t]

But even pre-google newsgroups were available via web browser and services like Deja News ...

Re:let's store the Internet

[Trax3001BBS]

But even pre-google newsgroups were available via web browser and services like Deja News ...

Shame about Deja News http://www.dejanews.com/

[slow clap]

[pushing-robot]

The last link is a nice touch.

Working link for Amber download

[DavidRothman9947]

Try this link: http://amberlink.org/#download and email me at davidrothman@pobox.com if it does not work. Don't blame the Amber. It's possible something happened when I was posting the item here. OK. You may now switch off your irony detectors. Thanks. DR (not associated with Amber but glad it's around!)

The Internet Archive is a poor backup

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:The Internet Archive is a poor backup

[mujadaddy]

Are there not 'evil' crawlers which ignore robots.txt, serving the public interest? That is a kind of disappointing.

Robustify,js

[tuxzone]

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

Future "Mystery of the Universe"

[VernonNemitz]

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?"

Good idea...

[Lumpy]

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.