Show HN: Mummify – Preserve web content, fight link rot

https://www.mummify.it

by zek • 13 years ago

90 66 13 years ago

jboynyc• 13 years ago

Interesting in light of this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6504331

But to trust that something like this to make a permanent copy of stuff I'm linking to, I'd need to know a bit more about them. Else this is effectively like using a link shortener -- a single point of failure.

zek2• 13 years ago

Hey creator here, we realize there is a bit of a trust issue, thats why we have the paid plans. Our costs are low enough that, even if you were our only paying customer left we would be able to keep the service running just for you.

alok-g3• 13 years ago

What Web services are you using in the back-end (that may potentially shut down)? I need my data accessible for low number of decades.

Pxtl• 13 years ago

Things like this should be required when posting links in Stack Overflow and the like.

toomuchtodo3• 13 years ago

Rant: I absolutely hate when someone posts an answer in Stack Overflow and it points to their blog, which then stops working at some point. What if Wikipedia was just a collection of links to blogs or other datasources (citations aside). Put your damn answers in Stack Overflow people!

junto• 13 years ago

One point to note is that a DMCA takedown targeted at Mummify.it will remove the content just as it would from the nytimes.com.

If I manually save that content to disk then any DMCA take down doesn't affect the content stored on my local hard disk.

toomuchtodo3• 13 years ago

If it's something personal, I use http://archive.is with their bookmarklet in Chrome (free; unlimited archiving). It immediately renders the page, saves a copy with a unique url, and gives me a .zip link to download the archive.

If it's something I want to submit to the Internet Archive, I use wget with WARC extensions (http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Wget_with_WARC_ou...), submit the archive to the IA and notify them it needs to be merged in, and keep the .tar.gz archive.

Eventually I'll webapp/one-click the whole thing, with an archive to S3 and/or Glacier.

Disclaimer: archiveteam participant

kseistrup• 13 years ago

asciimo• 13 years ago

Good point. Perhaps a "download catacombs" feature?

harvestmoon• 13 years ago

This feature would make it much more useful.

brianobush• 13 years ago

What if the server was not in the US? A DMCA takedown notice would not apply.

icebraining2• 13 years ago

That's actually worse, since if there's no DMCA-like safe harbour, they can be sued immediately.

MWil• 13 years ago

and if Mummify goes down...

Would it be a better option if the "permanents" were shared across p2p/bittorrent and every unique item had at least 10 shares distributed across the globe, maybe a max of 20. When one share host goes down, it just picks up a replacement.

Nux• 13 years ago

Let's centralise the interwebs!

It seems like a bad idea, but they do have a point. Maybe when referencing a link also make a small note to one of these archive sites?

desireco42• 13 years ago

I don't get the number of free/paid mummifications? Seems very low, space or bandwidth are abundant.

I think, and with respect to original developer, this is more a feature then an app and probably would help if it would be developed further to target more specific problem/group.

Having said that, I wish you best.

itry• 13 years ago

First I had to make an account.

Then it doesnt work. Stuck at "caching page".

I hate you.

zek2• 13 years ago

Sorry you are having trouble with it. Sometimes the caches take a bit to generate. Please feel free to shoot us an email at help@mummify.it if your problem persists.

tombrossman2• 13 years ago

FYI, for those of us with Firefox's NoScript extension your site is completely broken. Nothing loads, it is just a blank page with a list of scripts you intend to run.

I wasn't curious enough about your service to whitelist your site, but I will leave a comment asking that you consider providing alternate content.

It is rare to have a site completely fail to load, even with all scripts blocked (though I accept I will have reduced functionality).

primigenus• 13 years ago

From your profile:

Intelligent but bad at communication. Trying to improve my communication skills.

Start by not posting "I hate you" to people on the internet.

contextual2• 13 years ago

This is an example of how great branding can help explain a product. Love the name, love the look, the copy is clever... but I don't like the low number of mummifications you get per plan.

I suggest adding more value or lowering the monthly price.

Overall, very cool.

gabemart2• 13 years ago

Most of the time, one will not know which pages one links to will disappear in the future. This service therefore only seems really useful if you use it with every link you make. That would make the biggest plan short on "mummies" by a couple of orders of magnitude, at least.

contextual2• 13 years ago

Not every page one visits is worth storing. The whole point is to filter out (and save) the good from the rest.

An aside: Mummify needs browser plugins for all the major browser to make saving as seamless as possible.

gabemart2• 13 years ago

Not every page one visits is worth storing. The whole point is to filter out (and save) the good from the rest.

If this is a tool to "fight link rot", then we're not talking about every page one visits, we're talking about every page one links to. Presumably, every page worth linking to is also worth saving.

nine_k2• 13 years ago

The approach is nice, the problem being solved is real. Hopefully paying customers will flock in.

The question: is mummify.it itself going to go under some day?

So I'll wait for an open-source analog of this service, to run on my own tiny server. (Or carve some time to write it myself, of course.)

toomuchtodo3• 13 years ago

There already is an open source analog:

http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Wget_with_WARC_ou... + http://archive.org/web/web.php

nine_k2• 13 years ago

Wget is definitely a good start. What's needed is a shiny and usable UI, ways to catalog / tag / search inside your saved data, and a painless installation process. This could use come work.

arb99• 13 years ago

Weird pricing plan. At even the most expensive plan (of 15$/mo) only 50 'mummies' a month. Seems like an arbitrarily low number

hk__2• 13 years ago

There are free alternatives, like Peeep.us [1] and Archive.is.

[1] http://www.peeep.us/

[2] http://archive.is/

alok-g3• 13 years ago

From Peeep FAQ:

How long will Peeep keep my data?

Virtually forever. Nevertheless, we retain a right to remove content which has not been accessed for a month.

lesinski• 13 years ago

How is Mummify going to get around the copyright implications of ripping off the now removed piece of content which they don't own?

Also wondering: what happens if the publisher redirects the old URL to a new place -- maybe an "update"... or maybe a useless hub page?

AznHisoka2• 13 years ago

50 mummies per month for the highest plan is way way way too low. It should 10,000 or even 50,000. Think about it this way: the people who are willing to pay you for this type of service are probably huge publishers who would use this service to share their URLs to their followers in Twitter, Facebook, etc.

zackbloom2• 13 years ago

Doesn't help them much if a huge publisher is paying them $15 a month. That type of sale would require a SLA too, they really just need a contact email address.

AznHisoka2• 13 years ago

Oh the price should increase too. Right now OP is targeting a imaginary customer. Who would pay $15 a month just for 50 mummies?

alok-g3• 13 years ago

I would be happy with 1000 per month. Typically 10 from HN everyday and 10 from elsewhere. But I would not pay $50 per month for this.

nixpulvis• 13 years ago

Maybe also offer a callback with the contents of the cached site, so developers can handle 404 redirects themselves.

SmackCat2• 13 years ago

Your logo looks like a dog with a boner. Cool concept though.

mikeg8• 13 years ago

Haha I actually thought the same thing. It's like the FedEx logo... once you see the boner, you can't not see the boner.

eniacpx• 13 years ago

Thanks. Fedex and Tom Cruise's center tooth.....

SmackCat2• 13 years ago

Ha! I didn't realize the Tom Cruise Tooth one until this: http://www.buzzfeed.com/lyapalater/you-may-never-be-able-to-...

Noelkd• 13 years ago

do you get 10 additional mummies per month? Assuming this site stayed open could be a great help to sites like stackoverflow.

Kiro• 13 years ago

What about SEO?

Axsuul2• 13 years ago

A 301 redirect should pass link juice fine.

vijucat• 13 years ago

I have been using the Scrapbook add-on (see screenshots and manual here : [1]) in Firefox [2] for many years for this; it saves the web page to your local hard disk, and there are several types of annotations that you can perform on the saved page. One trick I use is to first run Readability on the page to get a clean version, and then save that to Scrapbook. With full-text and comments-only-search, this add-on, all by itself, kept me with Firefox even during the dark period when Chrome came in and thrashed Firefox on performance :-)

I used to use diigo.com, which does the job quite well, too, before I discovered Scrapbook.

[1] http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/ [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/scrapbook/

donpdonp• 13 years ago

Its worth mentioning the http://archiveteam.org/ which does a lot of important web archival work.

They use the Web ARChive format (WARC http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/WARC ) which I hope mummify and other such services will standardize on.

pasbesoin• 13 years ago

The OP depends upon Javascript for any and all content delivery/rendition. Given the topic at hand, I find this more than a bit ironic.

I gather from the comments that this is some sort of online storage of a copy. That may serve some use cases over the short term.

If you really want to avoid loss or "link rot", maintain your own copy on your own equipment.

I've been around to observe everything from personal interest changes, death, corporate policy changes, ownership transfers, deliberate manipulation... etc. -- you get the idea -- effect the ability to pull even what were formerly considered very stable and long-standing, aka "permanent", resources.

If you want to ensure you have access, save your own copy onto hardware that you own. End of story.

acdha• 13 years ago

Just to second what donpdonp said (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6509604), I think a service like this needs to offer a standard format WARC (http://archive-access.sourceforge.net/warc/) download.

The whole point of a service like this is long-term access and that really requires a data checkout option which can be used with other tools (e.g. https://github.com/alard/warc-proxy).

lingben• 13 years ago

I use evernote premium ($45/year) which is much cheaper and includes a tonne of extra features.

Compare this to the pricing plan of mummify at $15/month pricing or $180/year. for that price I could buy a pair of HD with several terabytes of capacity and copy/paste the whole webpage, code, files and all using httrack.

lopsae• 13 years ago

The examples of the page don't work. Would be nice that they have some working examples right at hand to see how the redirecting or the mirroring work on each case.

d0m• 13 years ago

Do you rip video on the page too? If so, I would definitely use this service. I've got videos with my company brand a bit everywhere and I can't find a good way to download it or link to it so that it stay there permanently.

bjackman• 13 years ago

Just a thought: the "Link Rot" link should really be a Mummified link. I know Wikipedia isn't disappearing any time soon, but it just seemed silly to me not to "realise" the use case!

Anyway, very sexy site design IMO.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

This is pretty cool, I'd be happy with a service that mummified it to storage I control, since I've had pages that I've pointed to at archive.org vanish after the current robots.txt was changed.

subpixel2• 13 years ago

I use Safari web archives for a similar task.

But I wonder...isn't it safe to assume that, eventually, browser rendering engines* will change to the degree that something I saved 4+ years ago is essentially unreadable?

And doesn't that same potential problem apply to a hosted service as well?

*I'm using that vague term to describe everything I don't understand about how browsers render pages, markup, and javascript, which is a lot.

dangero• 13 years ago

I agree. I think the safest bet would be to keep a static image as well. Without a static image would will always question if the rendering engine has even slightly changed the look.

hexley• 13 years ago

Maybe save as a PDF if it's the content you're most interested in.

newrenowhore• 13 years ago

Really like this, nice work. Is there a way to automatically mummify every link on an entire website or directory? Your method/service could be an interesting, easy to use way to recall a read-only version of a site after it goes down.

Show HN: Mummify – Preserve web content, fight link rot

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