Website Archival and Preservation | Unattributed

Photo by NOAA on Unsplash

Introduction

Michael Harley has been at it again in a follow-up post titled: What happens to our blogs when we die?. And, as usual his thoughts and ideas are really quite excellent. I highly recommend reading the original article.

But, as seems to be becoming a habit with me, I have some additional thoughts that might be of interest. In fact, in this case, I might be able to provide an interesting idea or two that Michael hadn’t considered.

Markdown & HTML

First, Michael made the point that he had been using some 11ty macros for processing his website. And now, because he is thinking of longer term storage of his posts, he is undoing the macros and converting them back into pure Markdown.

Something to think about: Markdown allows inline HTML, at least in part. So things like image handling could be converted into HTML. Why is this useful? And doesn’t it reduce the readability of the original files?

Yes, it does a little… But there is a long term gain to be had here. When using this approach you can use CSS classes with your image. This will allow you to have a consistent set of properties for images on your website. But more importantly: when producing an ePub version of the posts, you could substitute a new stylesheet that adjusts those properties for e-book and print mediums.

So, something as simple as is all that is needed, and won’t need to have attributes adjusted manually.

Generating E-Books

The idea of making an e-book archive of my websites was something I hadn’t considered before. But it’s really a good idea, and something I wish I had thought of before.

One of the things I had considered recently was at least having another backup of my articles stored locally. I decided to add the RSS feeds for my sites to Thunderbird. That way I would have local copies of everything from my site, and a quick way to verify that posts published when they were scheduled.

But, generating an ePub is quite literally just as easy. All I did was use Calibre. I created a custom News source recipe for all my sites, told it to download 31 days of articles on the 28th of each month. (Have to deal with that silly February issue.) The news system uses the RSS feeds from sites and translates the XML output into XHTML for ePub books.

Now, I didn’t dig into this part, but I think the point I was making above could be handled with Calibre… That is, you could implement the custom stylesheet as part of the XML conversion process. That would mean less time spent on creating a home-grown system for converting blogposts into ePub format.

But, wait, there are more possibilities here… If your site provides an RSS feed for comments, you can make an e-book of them. You would have to merge them with the original post later, but you can at least archive them this way. Also, if you are on Mastodon, or a similar site, you can get RSS feeds for your posts on there too. I don’t think you get the responses, but at least you can archive your posts.

There is one consideration to all of this: you might want to remove Calibre’s footer that has the original link for the article / post, and the retrieval date. Although personally, I think having both the published date and the retrieval date in the e-book is a good idea. Also, I don’t know how this would look for Mastodon posts.

Another Archive

On the subject of digital archives. Something else to consider: The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. While this is something that might suffer a fate at some point down the road, I have some faith that they will likely survive most of the technology and platforms we are using today.

One of the things that I like about micro.blog is that they have built-in actions for the Wayback Machine. IE, when a post is published on my site, the Wayback Machine gets a copy automatically. No waiting for a bot to scan my site.

Another cool thing about the Wayback Machine is that it will capture the changes to our sites and content over time. Something that we can’t easily do with building archival e-books or printed books. In fact, a yearly book can suffer from the issue of changes / edits made to articles after their initial publication.

Given the Internet Archive has been around since 1996, and they have managed to continually expand their storage facilities I think it’s safe to say they will be around for another 30, 60 or maybe even 100 years. Long term archival of our digital lives can be accomplished with the service of Internet Archive.

A Real Book

This part really caught my attention:

Then the part I’m actually looking forward to: a printed book, once a year. I did the math and it’s a real book, not a pamphlet.

Given that I am a person who has started doing a lot of my writing using fountain pens (see: Why Fountain Pens?) I sat up and took notice when I read this part. Michael...