afrowheels

If there are websites you find useful or interesting please archive them using the Internet Archive: archive.org

Paste the URL into the box and if the page has not been archived yet you should be given the option to do so. Best to do so for sites that are completed or not likely to change, but nothing stopping you from archiving multiple times at different dates.

I was clicking on links from some oldish threads and finding that none of the sites existed any more which was sad.

Not currently necessary for CrazyGuyOnaBike blogs, though no harm in doing so for those too I suppose.

(I have started a blog for my current tour on CrazyGuy but I have a lot else to do off the bike so I am quite behind: https://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/..._id=24799&v=1K)

BikeLite

I thought google webcrawler did that automagically.

Tourist in MSN

A lot of photos on this website have disappeared. I suspect that people used a commercial free photo posting website and later that website changed to subscription, at which time photos for non-payers disappeared.

I post a lot of photos on this site so that the image is saved to this site, but I photo reduce them first to 20 percent of original size, result is less than half a meg for memory per photo so the cost of memory should not be too bad.

I have posted a few links from websites here that disappeared, for example a magazine that was bought out, the new owner of the publication deleted old files. But even if I had saved a copy, I would be hesitant to post the original here as it likely was copyrighted by someone else.

afrowheels

Sometimes it does, yes. But in my experience it is at best haphazard - depends on the algorithm, etc.

Yeah, good point: that's a problem too. An alternative is to archive something before posting it and then post the archived URL instead: that's the approach encouraged for Wikipedia editing.

raybo

I maintain an archive of touring links that I started in 2007 (https://biketouringtips.com). When I find articles, webpages, or other interesting stuff, I put a link to it in my archive. At the moment, there are over 2600 things in the archive, consisting mostly of links to bike touring information around the world, but also my tour journals and articles I've written. I also have a bike tour planning page that I (and anyone can) use to keep track of the research I do for my bike trips. The sole purpose of the (non-commercial) site is to help bike tourists find useful information.

Link rot is a major problem with such an archive. Over the years, I have tried various methods to keep the links in the archive up to date. It is hard to visit 2000+ links very often. I have found that the official sites of states and other governments move things around all the time, breaking links in the process.

Incidentally, if someone would like to help me keep these links up to date, let me know. Also, if you want to add links into the archive that you think might be of use to other bike tourists, you can do so after a free registration.

njkayaker

You are already fortunate that people even post useful (hopefully) stuff. You probably won't get much traction asking for more.

afrowheels

raybo Cool! I wasn't aware of your page - will definitely be checking it out.

@njkayaker I think you are misunderstanding the intention: if people are making the effort to post information here presumably they would like it to remain accessible in future. The 'request' is just that they preserve or post that information in a way that means it stays accessible. Hardly takes a minute.