This Page is Designed to Last: A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web

[this is aaronland] a tale of gummy snakes (and spunk)

About halfway through this talk transcript, Aaron starts dropping a barrage of truth bombs:

I understand the web, whose distinguishing characteristic is asynchronous recall on a global scale, as the technology which makes revisiting possible in a way that has genuinely never existed before the web.

What the web has made possible are the economics of keeping something, something which has not enjoyed “hockey stick growth”, around long enough for people to warm up to it. Or to survive long past the moment when people may have grown tired of it.

If your goal is to build something which is designed to flip inside of ten years, like many things in the private sector, that may not seem like a very compelling argument.

If, however, your goal is to build something to match the longevity of the cultural heritage sector, to meet the goal of fostering revisiting, or for novel ideas to outlast the reluctance of the present and to do so at a global scale, or really any scale larger than shouting distance, then I will challenge you to find a better vehicle for doing so than the internet, and the web in particular.

Blogs and longevity | James’ Coffee Blog

When I write a blog post, I want it to live on my blog, rather than a platform. I can thus invest my time thinking about how to make my blog better and backing it up, rather than having to worry about where my writing is, finding ways to export data from a platform, setting up persistent backups, etc.

How Websites Die ⁑ Wesley’s Notebook

This is like the Gashlycrumb Tinies but for websites:

It’s been interesting to see how websites die — from domain parking pages to timeouts to blank pages to outdated TLS cipher errors, there are a multitude of different ways.

What is happening to our digital archives?

Employing the principle of least power for better digital preservation:

New frameworks and technologies spring up to try and cope with the speed of change. More and more ways to build and release things faster and cheaper becomes the norm. And, the more this happens, the more we deviate from standards: good ol’ HTML and CSS.

Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud

The cloud gives us collaboration, but old-fashioned apps give us ownership. Can’t we have the best of both worlds?

We would like both the convenient cross-device access and real-time collaboration provided by cloud apps, and also the personal ownership of your own data embodied by “old-fashioned” software.

This is a very in-depth look at the mindset and the challenges involved in building truly local-first software—something that Tantek has also been thinking about.