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In case you're looking for an alternative: consider using Perma.cc links, which both serve as a URL shortener and an archive of the current page.

(Plus they're expressly intended to last "forever" and are maintained by one of the few organizations with the multi-century history to credibly make that claim (Havard Law School))

https://perma.cc/about

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Strange they'd lean on a country code TLD since those can go sideways for political reasons.

That's a good point. For .cc in particular, it's the TLD for an Australian territory and is managed by Verisign so I'd expect the risks to be lower than with some TLDs. Still, though, a lot can happen in "forever" and you're right that it adds an (unnecessary?) risk

It doesn't matter who is 'managing' it, since the owner can choose to give that management to someone else.

True. I imagine Harvard has the necessary staff on hand to run a TLD themselves. Might make a good use for it.

.io is one such domain (Indian Ocean) and I won't use that domain for anything serious because of that.

They stopped giving out the monthly allowance of 10 links to free accounts in 2019.[1] New accounts now can archive 10 links, and that's it.

You might have access through a registered institution (e.g., libraries and universities get it for free). Otherwise, the rates for individuals are hidden on their blog.[2]

If you really want to archive and shorten a link at once, https://archive.today (often seen on HN for bypassing paywalls) is another option, but its unknown ownership makes its long-term existence slightly questionable. For general web archival, the Internet Archive (https://web.archive.org) looks like it'll be around for a little longer. But since its crawler and server have their own quirks, I'd still submit links to multiple services for good measure.

[1] https://blogs.harvard.edu/perma/2019/01/07/introducing-indiv...

[2] https://blogs.harvard.edu/perma/2021/09/15/usage-plans-updat...

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Speaking of web archive reliability, it looks like WebCite might have recently died for good, after a decade of funding issues and intermittent downtime[3][4]—the first major web archive to fall?

[3] https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/WebCite

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AWebCite#2021-10-27

I would love to know if the source code or an alternative to perma.cc is - otherwise, I want to build it myself!

edit: https://github.com/harvard-lil/perma

I’ve never heard of perma.cc before, but had a similar idea (likely more naive than however they are doing it) to save the content of a given url as an image and apply OCR, and keep both the image and the text saved. Got that working (somewhat well) and then dropped the project heh.

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