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Show HN: Vandal – an alternate navigator to Wayback Machine

vegetableman.github.io

134 pointsvigneshanand31 comments

I would love a way to skip the selection of a hyper-specific date and time. Most of the time I really do not care whether I'm looking at the page as it existed on March 18th 2006 at 9:13am, or April 21st 2006 at 7:44pm.

I just want "take me to 2006". One click. Where in 2006 doesn't matter, just do something for me, it's probably the right thing.

If I need to get into more detail, okay, THEN let me pull open a more specific capture picker.

Very much so. Usability is not great across archive.org (it has tons of gems, but they’re hard to find organically). My small recurring donation has the explicit goal of improving it, but it looks like that hasn’t happened yet.

The greatest Archive of the Internet (and perhaps humanity) deserves a better UI.

You will like this:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/view-page-arc...

I use this extension (the Chrome one), and it's really nice in that if the page you navigate to returns a 404 and it still exists in the wayback machine, the 404 page is replaced with a big 'view this on archive.org' button.

As someone who is constantly digging deep in the indie-web of personal websites which 50% of the time have long since gone, it's really useful.

Most of the controls in Vandal are designed to allow quick navigation to specific snapshots. But I do see a use case for a feature like "jump to year" .

This looks cool but I'm always reluctant to install ANY browser addons that "can read and change all your data on the websites you visit".

I'll keep in mind this addon exists, though.

I understand. It sounds awful. The use-case here being the built-in browser requires host permissions to all url's for navigation purposes. Removing it causing access issues when navigating to a another page through a link within the webpage.

Wouldn't it be easier (if a little less slick-looking) to hang the date selection UI off an extension bar button rather than putting it into the actual web page? Then that permission could potentially be dropped.

That would indeed work. But the utility of Vandal is to not just support navigation but also to present an alterative vision for time-travel :D.

could it be a website instead?

Then it would lose browser extension utility or in another words you wouldn't have it under you fingertips ready to use easily at any moment.

Well you could support both or make a browser extension that simply redirects there on click.

Not sure what permissions are needed to get the current url from the plugin though.

But if it's really more about a good way to browse the way back machine I think a web-service/site would make more sense. Installing a browser extension is quite a hurdle for something you don't need that often.

Too bad bookmarklets are not really a thing anymore, that would work well.

It's ironic that all the addons that I use to increase my privacy require full access to read my web browsing data: HTTPS Everywhere, uBlock Origin, Firefox Multi-Account Containers, etc.

I'm mostly fine with those permissions as long as it's a recommended extension[1]. Otherwise: no, never. Bait and switch is real.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...

Personally I'm afraid that as soon as the wayback machine becomes popular enough, calls for its censorship will start the surface, along with takedown requests for IP. Is there a solution to this other than obscurity?

decentralization a la libgen

I kinda doubt that it scales. Libgen is 33TB, wayback is 10PB.

chia is already up to an exabyte; not quite the same thing but i think it shows the limits of possibility

Named after Vandal Savage - cool!

yes. haha!

This looks great! Would be nice to have a way to see the source collection (e.g. "Save Page Now" or ArchiveBot) for a given capture.

Thanks for checking out, sanqui! That's an interesting use case, am curious as to why is that information useful for you?

Data provenance. If it came from Save Page Now, the Internet Archive archived it. If it came from ArchiveBot, ArchiveTeam archived it.

Makes sense . I will dig in to this further. Am sure wayback provides this detail somewhere in it's api.

Some api docs here that aren’t easy to find: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Nsv52MvSjbLb2PCpHlat0gkz...

(yes, this is official documentation)

It's still in draft. likely to change. Also, it's for the save api, won't get the required info there.

Is there a more canonical url for that doc’s info? Also, is the CDX api the proper endpoint for Wayback provenance data?

Don't know. However, You can keep track of the issue here: https://github.com/vegetableman/vandal/issues/8

(Kind of unrelated) What happens if the Internet Archive gets taken down? Does anyone have a mirror of their petabytes of data?

This is exactly what I need and what I was looking for!

Novel idea :)

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