Archives
Speaking of serendipity, not long after I wrote about making a static archive of The Session for people to download and share, I came across a piece by Alex Chan about using static websites for tiny archives.
The use-case is slightly different—this is about personal archives, like paperwork, screenshots, and bookmarks. But we both came up with the same process:
I’m deliberately going low-scale, low-tech. There’s no web server, no build system, no dependencies, and no JavaScript frameworks.
And we share the same hope:
Because this system has no moving parts, and it’s just files on a disk, I hope it will last a long time.
You should read the whole thing, where Alex describes all the other approaches they took before settling on plain ol’ HTML files in a folder:
HTML is low maintenance, it’s flexible, and it’s not going anywhere. It’s the foundation of the entire web, and pretty much every modern computer has a web browser that can render HTML pages. These files will be usable for a very long time – probably decades, if not more.
I’m enjoying this approach, so I’m going to keep using it. What I particularly like is that the maintenance burden has been essentially zero – once I set up the initial site structure, I haven’t had to do anything to keep it working.
They also talk about digital preservation:
I’d love to see static websites get more use as a preservation tool.
I concur! And it’s particularly interesting for Alex to be making this observation in the context of working with the Flickr foundation. That’s where they’re experimenting with the concept of a data lifeboat
What should we do when a digital service sinks?
This is something that George spoke about at the final dConstruct in 2022. You can listen to the talk on the dConstruct archive.