Discussion
If you love a website, back it up, and a free browser extension does it in minutes...
Misty De Meo wrote on October 29 about teapuppies dot com, a fan site for an anime series and toy line called Ochaken. "The site had been online since 2004 and had basically not changed since 2005," she wrote, and when she went back, "the domain is now being used to serve online gambling ads."
Her point is that you don't have to wait for some big archive to save it for you.
Webrecorder, which makes it, says it runs "on any Chromium-based browser (Google Chrome, Brave, Edge)," and that "Everything captured with the extension remains private unless shared and can be viewed while offline." You can "Export archiving sessions to both WARC and WACZ files," so the copy isn't stuck inside one app.
For a whole site, she points to Browsertrix, which crawls for you.
It's the only paid tool she recommends, with a seven-day trial, though it's open source if you'd rather run your own copy.
Hacker News readers knew the feeling. One wrote "It's sad to slowly see the bitrot in my own bookmarks," and another said "wget did the trick for static content." A third just pleaded, "please archive websites with important information."
I'd pick the one site I'd miss most and save it this week. Then keep more than one copy of the file.
Tea puppies deserved better.
"What I really want everyone to know is that you have control over the world around you," she wrote. She's also upfront that the company she works for makes the tools she recommends, which I appreciate, and most of them are free.
The easiest one is a browser extension called ArchiveWeb dot page. Her steps are short: click its icon in the toolbar, then "Start Archiving," visit the pages you want, click anything interactive so its data loads, then click "Stop Archiving."