Flutterby™! : Automation of Waybackification

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Automation of Waybackification

2025-06-11 17:54:41.205626+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments

I'm in email correspondence with someone who's suggested that I should automate older links on Flutterby tying to the Wayback Machine. And it's just a little bit of JavaScript, could be tied to a checkbox or something at the top of the page and a cookie, but it's also got me thinking about how much an individual site attempts to override a user's browsing behavior.

One of the things that drives me fucking nuts about software is when the software thinks it can do better than the plaform services, and creates additional layers on top of the system in ways that attempt to replace (and often interfere) with the underlying systems.

And it could go further, I'll sometimes link to archive.ph or similar services if something has a paywall, which I also sometimes feel kinda guilty about (although it seems like it's generally "a take"/dunking on the article, so...), is it reasonable to do that?

Or do I just assume the sophistication of users to derive such links through whatever means they have (manually, plug-ins, whatever)?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering ]

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Format with:

(You should probably use "Text" mode: URLs will be mostly recognized and linked, _underscore quoted_ text is looked up in a glossary, _underscore quoted_ (http://xyz.pdq) becomes a link, without the link in the parenthesis it becomes a <cite> tag. All <cite>ed text will point to the Flutterby knowledge base. Two enters (ie: a blank line) gets you a new paragraph, special treatment for paragraphs that are manually indented or start with "#" (as in "#include" or "#!/usr/bin/perl"), "/* " or ">" (as in a quoted message) or look like lists, or within a paragraph you can use a number of HTML tags:

p, img, br, hr, a, sub, sup, tt, i, b, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, cite, em, strong, code, samp, kbd, pre, blockquote, address, ol, dl, ul, dt, dd, li, dir, menu, table, tr, td, th

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Dan Lyke
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