Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever
As I get older, I've decided to write physical books. I want something of a legacy for after I leave.
In the back of the book, I'd like to put a 2D barcode to send folks to a static webpage somewhere, maybe for further information, an update, text changes, etc.
But where would that go? If I buy a domain I've got to renew it every year. Same goes for AWS static page hosting. I thought about using my GitHub account, but each year they keep screwing around with keys and logins and whatnot. I'm sure that most all of these places I'm using will delete both my account and data after a certain number of years of inactivity.
So where do I put a static webpage I can link to and be assured (mostly) that it'll be around 100 years or more from now?
100 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadI do mantain a stripped-down ZIP of one of my key sites in Zenodo:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10119195
But maybe you could just host a plain-text or similar file there or at Dryad and hand out the DOI / URL?
One shout might be to link to internet archive instead of the resource directly. Though we can't be sure internet archive will keep the current system working as is (e.g. search params may change etc)
The only solid solution I have is to set up a foundation and pour money in so that they will be responsible for upkeep. But that would be an hassle to execute.
100 years in internet time is very long, internet as we know it now hasn't been along for 100 years.
I wonder if there aren't services that specialize in this.
The foundation has a remit to also do some related "good works". The idea is that the pot of money (and the interest it throws off) acts as an incentive to keep the foundation going. Eventually the cost of hosting "legacy" data should drop close to zero. You could run it as an overlay on two clouds initially to avoid capital outlay.
I think you would want librarians / archivists on the board. It wouldn't require much in the way of software, making something that could last in the long term is more of a governance problem than a technical one.
If you’re OK with your website having a big ugly URL (which might not be a problem if you use a QR code to point to it anyway) then hosting a static website on AWS S3 might be your best bet. There’s so much money flowing into AWS right now, I imagine there will be enough interest to keep it going for several decades to come.
EDITED TO ADD As far as i know you can prepay your AWS bills, so you could prepay a massive amount and hope it outruns future price inflation
At least that's the case today, but the policy may change tomorrow. It's not easy to guarantee anything 10 years from now, let alone 100 years.
I don't expect it to last 100 years though, they may very well change their free policies a year from now, hell, i don't know if AWS or even Amazon will be around 100 years from now.
You print it and add it to your book (not sure if any ink will do, though)
More about Project Gutenberg: http://gutenberg.org
Not the entire book. I wouldn't have to copyleft the entire thing, right?
My current static page is just an "I like this book, please give me this free thing and put me on a mailing list" kind of thing. But that's not really the point. The point is "how can I use static pages, presumably the thing the internet was built for, to put a few pages of extra material on the book and perhaps give links for folks to follow if they're interested in the topic?"
Traditionally, you'd issue a new edition with such information, but that seems like a hella work and expenditure, and small stuff like this should be the kind of thing you'd be able to stick somewhere online, if nothing else as a parking spot until you eventually publish a new edition.
I wonder if the Internet Archive would be interested in this kind of archival.
Unfortunately, with the recent attack, the purl.org resolver went offline and remains so. All the purl data is still there and is accessible to the public, you just don't get resolvable URLs for them.
Nowadays, it seems like ARKs are the better way to go, anyway, and the attack on archive.org proved it perfectly. Look into <https://arks.org/>
(The Internet Archive mints ARKs for every item uploaded to its collections. You may have noticed them in the infobox below the fold when looking at a given item.)
As for your latter remarks, the Internet Archive will take just about anything. Create an account and start uploading. Ted Nelson has a huge chunk of his papers on there.
Possibly even some useful legitimate fodder for those fashionable AI data sinks!
2. Put it in a Ethereum transaction.
More seriously, I have no idea.
The ink degradation might be a concern. And it would require some expertise to reassemble.
I for example wouldn't know what to do with a barcode even today.
I’m not.
Would you know what to do with a record? That's 150 year old technology. If not you know how to look up the information hopefully?
And, if you knew what to do with these things, would you be able to actually do it?
IPFS could be a contender, though I don't know where it stands now, but it's the ambition, at least.
Everything has an end.
They make money with Adsense, and it turn Google does to.
Google has killed a lot of products but in my opinion they will keep this. There are just so many blogs, little and small, some who have posts dating from '99 even, still online.
Google in 2024 feels like IBM in 1974. The brand will surely exist fifty years from now, but possibly much diminished. I wouldn’t count on any specific product surviving the “legacification” of Google.
Poe’s law at its best.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:arweave.net+book
As Arweave is designed for this exact use case. Even if arweave.net disappears, one can still find the content one the Arweave blockchain via the hash. The chain is built in a way that it creates a very high incentive for people around the world to keep hosting the content.
Which kinda proves the concept works. People shitting on web3 are clueless what it is.
https://posthaven.com/pledge
print the code of the static webpage on a piece of paper. Even better, archival paper [0], so it will really last a long time.
In the future, anyone would be able to point a... smartphone, or a camera, to the paper, and instantly retrieve the webpage. An AI will ask them if they want to render the page using one of these very, very old things called browsers.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid-free_paper
> In the back of the book, I'd like to put a 2D barcode to send folks to a static webpage somewhere, maybe for further information, an update, text changes, etc.
How are you going to put the update/text change into the printed book? I think the point was tobe able to change the info when the books are already distributed.
You may still find user pages on universities that goes back to the early 90's, before that simply there was no web, and that was just 30 years back, 10 years earlier was the start of TCP/IP, mail and DNS protocols. But 20 years later from now things may be very different to what we know so far.
Maybe it would be for the better to ride the waves, and instead of doing things like we did till a few years back, rely on AIs or other systems that will hold that knowledge somewhat and that can be interacted with. And hope that where you put the today's style static web page with your book addendum gets indexed by them and used when the consumer of the content you created request it somehow.
You cannot fight change, and you cannot fight your own impermanence. And so what if it does last 100 years, then what? Should it last 200? 1000? 1,000,000? Just be, and be happy. Live, laugh, love is wiser advice than you’d think.
The Long Now Foundation would like to have a word.
It's not like they sell web hosting that I'm trying to get OP to use.
I'd suggest you do buy a domain, but set up a legal/financial framework so that a long-standing law firm will keep up the payments for N decades (or for as long as the firm & its successors exist).
"Free" data storage for as long as the internet exists.
Make the barcode to your transaction with the data, anyone with a brain and time can figure it out from there.
The big blockchains are robust, but I'm wondering if it's not impossible for them to not need the full blockchain at some point.
Oh ye of so much faith.
- Make your static data small.
- Pick a version scheme and use it.
- Gather your static data into a release, including an indicator of the version, and sign it.
- Also gather your static data into a form easily transmittable by others. If your static data will fit into a few pages of PDFs, it can be read by just about anything with a CPU that real people touch, and can also be printable. There are many tools that create PDFs that aren't Adobe.
- HTML archives, such as those that SingleFile make, are better than PDFs but less accessible (e.g. not viewable on phones, require extension to be installed).
- License the content in a way that encourages sharing.
- Make sure the content itself encourages sharing. Good, unique artwork tends to do this, in addition to the data itself being interesting or important. Comics from the 1940s made it to the Internet age and they'll probably make the post-Internet age too.
- Discord, Telegram, and Github would be an example of three places that would understand the concept of "here's a PDF of a site, here for archival purposes, feel free to share this to anyone or print it."