Journal tags: archiving

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.

When I went up to London for the State of the Browser conference last month, I shared the train journey with Remy.

I always like getting together with Remy. We usually end up discussing sci-fi books we’re reading, commiserating with one another about conference-organising, discussing the minutiae of browser APIs, or talking about the big-picture vision of the World Wide Web.

On this train ride we ended up talking about the march of time and how death comes for us all …and our websites.

Take The Session, for example. It’s been running for two and a half decades in one form or another. I plan to keep it running for many more decades to come. But I’m the weak link in that plan.

If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, The Session will keep running. The hosting is paid up for a while. The domain name is registered for as long as possible. But inevitably things will need to be updated. Even if no new features get added to the site, someone’s got to install updates to keep the underlying software safe and secure.

Remy and I discussed the long-term prospects for widening out the admin work to more people. But we also discussed smaller steps I could take in the meantime.

Like, there’s the actual content of the website. Now, I currently share exports from the database every week in JSON, CSV, and SQLite. That’s good. But you need to be tech nerd to do anything useful with that data.

The more I talked about it with Remy, the more I realised that HTML would be the most useful format for the most people.

There’s a cute acronym in the world of digital preservation: LOCKSS. Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. If there were multiple copies of The Session’s content out there in the world, then I’d have a nice little insurance policy against some future catastrophe befalling the live site.

With the seed of the idea planted in my head, I waited until I had some time to dive in and see if this was doable.

Fortunately I had plenty of opportunity to do just that on some other train rides. When I was in Spain and France recently, I spent hours and hours on trains. For some reason, I find train journeys very conducive to coding, especially if you don’t need an internet connection.

By the time I was back home, the code was done. Here’s the result:

The Session archive: a static copy of the content on thesession.org.

If you want to grab a copy for yourself, go ahead and download this .zip file. Be warned that it’s quite large! The .zip file is over two gigabytes in size and the unzipped collection of web pages is almost ten gigabytes. I plan to update the content every week or so.

I’ve put a copy up on Netlify and I’m serving it from the subdomain archive.thesession.org if you want to check out the results without downloading the whole thing.

Because this is a collection of static files, there’s no search. But you can use your browser’s “Find in Page” feature to search within the (very long) index pages of each section of the site.

You don’t need to a web server to click around between the pages: they should all work straight from your file system. Double-clicking any HTML file should give a starting point.

I wanted to reduce the dependencies on each page to as close to zero as I could. All the CSS is embedded in the the page. Likewise with most of the JavaScript (you’ll still need an internet connection to get audio playback and dynamic maps). This keeps the individual pages nice and self-contained. That means they can be shared around (as an email attachment, for example).

I’ve shared this project with the community on The Session and people are into it. If nothing else, it could be handy to have an offline copy of the site’s content on your hard drive for those situations when you can’t access the site itself.

When I post a link, I do it for two reasons.

First of all, it’s me pointing at something and saying “Check this out!”

Secondly, it’s a way for me to stash something away that I might want to return to. I tag all my links so when I need to find one again, I just need to think “Now what would past me have tagged it with?” Then I type the appropriate URL: adactio.com/links/tags/whatever

There are some links that I return to again and again.

Back in 2008, I linked to a document called A Few Notes on The Culture. It’s a copy of a post by Iain M Banks to a newsgroup back in 1994.

Alas, that link is dead. Linkrot, innit?

But in 2013 I linked to the same document on a different domain. That link still works even though I believe it was first published around twenty(!) years ago (view source for some pre-CSS markup nostalgia).

Anyway, A Few Notes On The Culture is a fascinating look at the world-building of Iain M Banks’s Culture novels. He talks about the in-world engineering, education, biology, and belief system of his imagined utopia. The part that sticks in my mind is when he talks about economics:

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is — without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset — intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual immaturity and — through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others — a kind of synthetic evil.

Those three paragraphs might be the most succinct critique of unfettered capitalism I’ve come across. The invisible hand as a paperclip maximiser.

Like I said, it’s a fascinating document. In fact I realised that I should probably store a copy of it for myself.

I have a section of my site called “extras” where I dump miscellaneous stuff. Most of it is unlinked. It’s mostly for my own benefit. That’s where I’ve put my copy of A Few Notes On The Culture.

Here’s a funny thing …for all the times that I’ve revisited the link, I never knew anything about the site is was hosted on—vavatch.co.uk—so this most recent time, I did a bit of clicking around. Clearly it’s the personal website of a sci-fi-loving college student from the early 2000s. But what came as a revelation to me was that the site belonged to …Adrian Hon!

I’m impressed that he kept his old website up even after moving over to the domain mssv.net, founding Six To Start, and writing A History Of The Future In 100 Objects. That’s a great snackable book, by the way. Well worth a read.

If you were at An Event Apart in Boston and you want to follow up on some of the things I mentioned in my talk, here are some links:

• Stock and Flow by Robin Sloan.
• Archive Fever by Matt Ogle.
• This Place Is Not A Place Of Honor on Damn Interesting.
• The 10,000 Year Clock by The Long Now Foundation.
• Carl Sagan And Ann Druyan’s Ultimate Mix Tape by Radiolab.
• Small Pieces, Loosely Joined by David Weinberger.
• Lest We Forget or Why I chose the World Wide Web as a repository for archival material by Simon Pockley.
• Cool URIs Don’t Change by Tim Berners-Lee.
• “The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years.” on Long Bets.
• Game Web 2.Over? by Meg Pickard.
• Link Rot by Connor O’Brien.
• Ugly and neglected fragments by Phil Gyford.
• Yahoo!locaust by Jason Scott.
• Goodbye Pownce, Hello Six Apart on the Pownce blog.
• Why you should have a website: it’s the law! by Steven Pemberton.
• The Domesday Project by the BBC.
• Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services by the Open Planets Foundation.
• Swiss Fort Knox.
• Validation by Own Briggs.
• [whatwg] several messages about HTML5 by Ian Hickson.
• Juggling oranges by Mark Pilgrim.
• Accelerando by Charles Stross.
• Microsoft and FairUse4WM by Bruce Schneier.
• Forever by Mandy Brown.
• Why The Net Matters: How the Internet Will Save Civilization by David Eagleman.

Here are some related posts of my own:

• The format of the Long Now,
• Tears in the rain,
• Erase and rewind,
• Linkrotting
• and a previous talk entitled The Long Web.

More recently, Nora Young interviewed Jason Scott on online video and digital heritage.