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Hey web devs, not breaking links doesn’t have to be hard…

Heard of the 404 → 307 technique? (Well, now you have!)

4042307.org/

🌲

#evergreenWeb #web #dev

404 → 307: What?

4042307.org
#dev #web #evergreenweb
in reply to Aral Balkan

chrysn
chrysn
• •
Are Mementos (RFC7089) still a thing? Sounds a bit like the same thing but being more explicit about what happens.
in reply to chrysn

Aral Balkan
Aral Balkan
• •
@chrysn Not sure, first time I’m hearing of it. Will look it up :)
@chrysn
in reply to Aral Balkan

Mx. Eddie R
Mx. Eddie R
• •
So the idea is to presrve the entire website on a deprecated/historical subdomain, then redirect progressively back in time until a hit or a 404-for-the-ages?
And the redirect means relative links will already be on the 2017 subdomajn so won't be masked by newer resources.
That is pretty slick!
in reply to Mx. Eddie R

Aral Balkan
Aral Balkan
• •

@silvermoon82 Glad you like it. Do let me know if you end up implementing it somewhere.

Maybe we can have a little list of sites that do…

@Mx. Eddie R
in reply to Aral Balkan

dandandin
dandandin
• •
i'm not really understanding how it works. I'm in the process of migrating wordpress with 15 years of posts to hugo and this stuff might be immensely useful
in reply to dandandin

Aral Balkan
Aral Balkan
• •

@dandandin Basically, if a path is not found on the latest server, it redirects to the same path on the previous server.

Does this help clarify it: mapstodon.space/@jorgesanz/113…

Jorge Sanz

2024-11-21 11:54:15


@ErikUden
maybe this helps? running curl against the me.html example shows clearly the proposed flow
A screenshot of executing curl -IL https://4042307.org/me.htm and how it redirects first to the 2017 subdomain and then to the 1997 subdomain, where it successfully returns the asset.

@dandandin
in reply to Aral Balkan

Anselm Schüler
Anselm Schüler
• •
ooh that's cool
in reply to Aral Balkan

Anselm Schüler
Anselm Schüler
• •

The way I'm currently hosting my website probably doesn't support this. I would have to find a way to get a (cheap dedicated) proxy server that rewrites this, or to find a way to get GitHub Pages to route based on domain…

I mean, I should switch to a better way to host it anyways. But I should also actually finish my small rewrite and write content. And I should also acquire money and free time to be able to do that…

in reply to Aral Balkan

Angie Taylor
Angie Taylor
• •
Do you have any good resources or guides on how a non-web-savvy designer can make their website better in terms of small tech, privacy etc?
in reply to Angie Taylor

Aral Balkan
Aral Balkan
• •
@angietaylor Not a comprehensive one but there was this mini site I wrote up back when Google announced FLoC that still has some general guidelines (nothing that should come as a revelation, really).
@Angie Taylor
in reply to Aral Balkan

Emma (IPG)
Emma (IPG)
• •
having planned to migrate my servers soon and probably going to inadvertently break links, this is a really good solution to mitigate that, thanks for the heads up
in reply to Emma (IPG)

Aral Balkan
Aral Balkan
• •
@ipg Yay! Please do let me know if you end up implementing it. I’d love to feature sites that do on the homepage :)
@Emma (IPG)
in reply to Aral Balkan

JeffersonBledsoe
JeffersonBledsoe
• •
Really like this approach to preserving links! Would there anyway to do this without still running the old site, e.g. DNS + wayback machine?
in reply to JeffersonBledsoe

Aral Balkan
Aral Balkan
• •
@JeffersonBledsoe You could just rewrite the links to Wayback Machine, I guess. But it doesn’t store things exactly as they were always. That said, you could also try a static export of some sort and map to that. You could have that on the same machine. That’s what I do on ar.al with a static export of my Wordpress content going back a few decades.
@JeffersonBledsoe
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