A few years ago, I amended the Emacs package for WordPress so that it automatically grabbed a screenshot of
whatever I linked to. That’s a low effort solution to the link rot problem — i.e., inevitably, all web sites die, and your blog ends up talking about web sites readers can no longer read.
Now, the Wayback Archive helps a lot with this, but it doesn’t have everything. Doing a “real” backup of web pages, HTML and all, would of course be better than screenshots, but that requires a lot of effort (considering all the security implications of running foreign JS on your own site, etc). So doing screenshots is, of course, not a perfect solution, but it’s a lot better than nothing. At least your readers can read themselves the things you’re talking about.
Anyway, I’m doing this post because the original way the package displayed the screenshots was just bug ugly. So I’ve now changed it:
I think that’s kinda useful, eh? (You can try it yourself with the links above, for instance.)
Anyway, the resulting Javascript and CSS is on Microsoft Github in the ewp package. I’m not actually expecting people to use this code as is in their WordPresses — I just hope somebody writes a WordPress plugin that does all this automatically (on the server side, without any client support). Because I think everybody who blogs should be doing this — there’s nothing as frustrating as searching for a subject, and then landing on a ten year old blog that talks about that vaguely, but all the links are now dead.
So c’mon. Write that plugin. Save the world.