Jeff Huang, while going through his collection of bookmarks, sadly finds a lot of old pages gone from the internet. Bit rot. It’s pretty bad. Most of what gets published on the web disappears. Thankfully, the Internet Archive gets a lot of it. Jeff has seven things that he thinks will help make a page last.
1) Return to vanilla HTML/CSS
2) Don’t minimize that HTML
3) Prefer one page over several
4) End all forms of hotlinking
5) Stick with the 13 web safe fonts +2
6) Obsessively compress your images
7) Eliminate the broken URL risk
I don’t take issue with any of that advice in general, but to me, they don’t all feel like things that have much to do with whether a site will last or not. Of them, #4 seems like the biggest deal, and #5 is… strange. (Fonts fall back on the web; what fonts you use should have no bearing on a site’s ability to last.)
I sort of agree with #1 and #2, but not on the surface. Both of them imply a build process. Build processes get old, they stop working, and they become a brick of technical debt. I still love them and can’t imagine day-to-day work without them, but they are things that stands in the way of people wanting to deal with an old site. Highly relevant: Simplicity, from Bastian Allgeier.
Everything listed is technological. If we’re talking technological advice to keeping a site online for the long haul, I’d say jamstack is the obvious answer. Prerender everything into static files. Rely on no third-party stuff anything, except a host. (Disclosure: Netlify is a current sponsor of this site, but I’m tellin’ ya, toss a simple static site without a complex build process up on Netlify, which has a generous free tier, and that site will absolutely be there for the long haul. )
Don’t diddle with your URLs either. Gosh darn it if I don’t see a lot of 404s because someone up and changed up all their URLs.
But I feel there is something beyond the technological that is the real trick to a site that lasts: you need to have some stake in the game. You don’t let your URLs die because you don’t want them to. They matter to you. You’ll tend to them if you have to. They benefit you in some way, so you’re incentivized to keep them around. That’s what makes a page last.
I think the last point is the most important. Content that you are still using doesn’t die so easily. Content hosted on your own site, which you are still using, is more persistant than content isolated somewhere you no longer use.
But somewhere over the last 25 years (which is how log I’ve had my own personal website) the concept of a single personal website with all your content faded. People began to scatter content into blogs, tweets, facebook posts, forums, repository pages. Instead of hosting a page with some example code on your own site you put it in a Fiddle or a Pen, if you need an image on your tweet you shove it on an image host, and so forth. Those fragments of content then become orphans, because they don’t live anywhere that you still have eyes on. (imgur is especially bad for this, older forum posts always seem to be missing their example images).
Even where people do have a personal site, it tends to be used as a blog (or a cv) instead of a general repository of everything, and I think that is a big contributor to vanishing content. So I’d extend point 4 to “Host as much as you can yourself”. It’s not just about hotlinking. If it isn’t meant to be transitory, put it on your own site.
Something I have started doing: when I read an article I like, or when I bookmark something, or when I feel like something should be saved, I use the Wayback Machine extension to quickly make a backup. It’s become a habit – one that feels great! I did it with this page (it’s already in there) and Bastian’s Simplicity post (that wasn’t in there) and Jeff’s post (that’s already got 139 snapshots). These posts are now saved for all time, even if something terrible happens to CSS Tricks. It’s also kinda cool you get previous versions of pages, too.
In doing this you definitely notice the sites that are better engineered to last. They tend to work great in the Wayback Machine, whereas poorly-engineered sites break. In this light, Jeff’s advice makes a whole lot of sense, because it makes sites super-friendly for archiving.
There are a number of ways to add a page to the Wayback Machine, but I use the extension because it automatically looks a page up there if it’s missing at the canonical address. This is very handy!
So a great way to make a page last is to make it easy to archive technically and then either submit individual pages yourself as you create them or, if you’re working on a larger-scale, consider getting an Archive-It subscription, where you can archive your whole site and support the Internet Archive at the same time. And donate, of course, because, you know: https://xkcd.com/2102/
Equivalent advice for building a house:
1. Use rocks. Nothing else will last much more than a hundred years
2. If your rocks are big enough, you don’t need anything to stick them together
3. Caves last even longer than rocks
4. Make sure you have a couple of years of supplies staged away. Don’t count on your neighbors – or the store – to be ready for the apocalypse
5&6 Decorating: the choice is yours, out of mud, charcoal and ochre
7. If the whole town lives in the one house, noone ever misses their mail. Build a bigger house, or just drive everyone else out of town.
Or: accept that maintaining a nice website (or house) is as big a job as building it, just spread out over more years…