Internet Archive: Difference between revisions

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The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization that is building a digital library, including archival copy of much of the public web.

How to

Trigger an Archive

You can tell archive.org to crawl and archive a specific URL immediately.

$ curl -I -H "Accept: application/json" https://web.archive.org/save/{url to archive} | grep Content-Location

and you'll get a response like:

Content-Location: /web/20160715203015/http://indieweb.org

(We have wiki entries for the -I option and the -H option to curl.)

The response includes the path to the archived page on web.archive.org. Append this path to https://web.archive.org to build the final URL for the archived page.

Trigger Archive in PHP

PHP snippet to call the curl_exec() function with appropriate options/params to trigger an archive:

$options = 
array(CURLOPT_URL => ('https://web.archive.org/save/' . $url_to_save),
      CURLOPT_HEADER => true,
      CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
      CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array('Accept: application/json'),
      CURLOPT_USERAGENT => "YOUR_CMS_NAME_HERE");
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
$info = curl_getinfo($ch);
curl_close($ch);

You can then check $info['http_code'] for a numeric HTTP return code to see if there was an error (e.g. >= 400) and take action accordingly.

Trigger Archive in Python (with requests)

This method requires the 'requests' Python library.

pip install requests

import requests

# fire and forget archive.org call
try:
    verify = requests.get(
        '%s%s' % ('https://web.archive.org/save/', target),
        allow_redirects=False,
        timeout=30,
    )
except:
    pass

Host Files on Archive.org

The Internet Archive wants to create a library of publicly available files. If you have legal rights to share they will host your content. Create an account and upload your files.

To "hotlink" to the files, if you want to embed the media file of a podcast in an audip element, for example, you need to use the following http://www.archive.org/download/[IDENTIFIER]/[FILENAME] instead of https://archive.org/details/[IDENTIFIER]/[FILENAME]

Trigger Archive in Ruby

This is a Ruby method that triggers archiving by the Internet Archive for a given URL. It returns the URL that you can visit to see the archived page. It uses the rest-client Ruby gem to make a GET request.

require 'rest-client'

def web_archive(url)
  archive_request_response = RestClient.get("https://web.archive.org/save/#{url}")
  "https://web.archive.org" + archive_request_response.headers[:content_location]
end

Known

(new!) There is a Known plugin to auto-archive your posts and edits to your posts, as well as pages that you bookmark:

• https://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2017/02/02/archive-org-wayback-machine-support-for-known/
• source: https://github.com/mapkyca/KnownWaybackMachine

Limitation(?)

• Appears to NOT archive the links in your posts, except for bookmark posts.
  • SHOULD: Archive all pages you link to, e.g. all pages that you (even attempt to e.g. do discovery on to) send Webmentions to.
  • Github issue: https://github.com/mapkyca/KnownWaybackMachine/issues/1 FIXED

WordPress

There is a useful little plugin Post Archival in the Internet Archive which will not only archive the user's post, but will also archive all the links within the post.

IndieWeb Examples

Jeremy Keith

Jeremy Keith has been pinging web.archive.org/save to archive pages that adactio.com posts link to since 2016-09-26

Aaron Parecki

Aaron Parecki has been pinging web.archive.org/save with every URL that a Webmention is sent to since 2016-09-26

Tantek

Tantek Çelik implemented (2016-11-13) pinging web.archive.org/save with every URL in a link/reply-to and has been doing it from tantek.com since 2016-11-15.

Chris Aldrich

Chris Aldrich implemented (2017-01-07) pinging the archive with URLs of both his own posts as well as links within posts using Post Archival in the Internet Archive.

svgur

Kevin Marks implemented pinging the archive with URLs of the SVG display posts, and thus indirectly the SVGs themselves

mention-tech

Kevin Marks implemented (2017-01-24) pinging the archive with both the source and target URLs of the webmention so that they get preserved too.

Jonathan LaCour

Jonathan LaCour implemented on 4/04 (HAH!) in 2018 using the Known plugin.

Requests

• Telegraph support - https://github.com/aaronpk/Telegraph/issues/14 - should support auto-archiving for any sent Webmention

See Also

• archival copy
• indiearchive
• Link Archiver on Twitter
• ...