Robust Links – Make Your Link Robust: automagically amend them with archived versions
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/26
Need to look into this further: [Wayback/Archive] Robust Links – Make Your Link Robust.
Likely running it on my blog requires JavaScript to be enabled which means going from the premium to the small business plan (at te time of writing from USD 8 to USD 25 per month: a 200+% increase).
Let’s first start with an example:
From [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on Twitter: “This is cool! RobustLinks by @Mementoweb finds a URL with caption in @waybackmachine or @archiveis, then gives back amended a elements with both original and versioned plus style that renders based on the JavaScript plus CSS (& allows to navigate to original or versioned).”
- URL=
https://robustlinks.mementoweb.org/ - Text=
Robustify your links!
Submitting gives [Wayback/Archive] robustlinks.mementoweb.org/robustify/?anchor_text=%20Robustify%20your%20links!&url=https%3A%2F%2Frobustlinks.mementoweb.org%2F with these bits of code as result:
<a href="https://robustlinks.mementoweb.org/"
data-versionurl="https://archive.ph/wip/LTc5P"
data-versiondate="2022-11-27"> Robustify your links!</ax<a href="https://archive.ph/wip/LTc5P"
data-originalurl="https://robustlinks.mementoweb.org/"
data-versiondate="2022-11-27"> Robustify your links!</a><!-- RobustLinks CSS -->
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="https://doi.org/10.25776/z58z-r575" />
<!-- RobustLinks Javascript -->
https://doi.org/10.25776/h1fa-7a28
The first defaults to the original URL (using href) and also has the archived URL (in data-versionurl).
The second defaults to the archived URL (using href) and also has the original (in data-originalurl).
Both have data-versiondate (which contains the date I wrote this blog post).
The third has the HTML code for loading the CSS and JavaScript code that you can include in the page (preferably in the head): combined they will render the anchors so you can access both the original and saved content.
You can find their source code in the repository [Wayback/Archive] iipc/robustlinks: Links on the web break all the time, robustify them!:
- [Wayback/Archive] robustlinks/robustlinks-min.js at master · iipc/robustlinks
- [Wayback/Archive] robustlinks/robustlinks.js at master · iipc/robustlinks
- [Wayback/Archive] robustlinks/robustlinks.css at master · iipc/robustlinks
- in context: [Wayback/Archive] https://iipc.github.io/robustlinks/robustlinks.css
Note that the JavaScript, when the [Wayback/Archive] Window: DOMContentLoaded event fired will rewrite all [Wayback/Archive] <a>: The Anchor element instances.
Documentation is spread over a few pages. I suggest starting at the first, then working your way down the list:
- [Wayback/Archive] Robust Links Tools
- [Wayback/Archive] Robustifying Links (with specifications)
- [Wayback/Archive] Robust Links – Make Your Link Robust (describing their API)
- [Wayback/Archive] The Code4Lib Journal – Robustifying Links To Combat Reference Rot
- [Wayback/Archive] Robustify your links! A working solution to create persistently robust links
External tools that can help you with archiving are these:
- [Wayback/Archive] Memento Depot
Memento Depot provides information about archives of web content that are accessible via the Memento protocol, specified in [Wayback/Archive] RFC 7089.
- [Wayback/Archive] AMBER
Amber is a tool for blogs & websites to keep linked content accessible
- [Wayback/Archive] SiteStory Web Archive – SiteStory Transactional Web Archive
Transactional Archiving consists of selectively capturing and storing transactions that take place between a web client (browser) and a web server.
- Web archiving: Transactional archiving – Wikipedia
It is primarily used as a means of preserving evidence of the content which was actually viewed on a particular website, on a given date. This may be particularly important for organizations which need to comply with legal or regulatory requirements for disclosing and retaining information.
- Web archiving: Transactional archiving – Wikipedia
- [Wayback/Archive] Memento Time Travel – Chrome Web Store
- [Wayback/Archive] Wayback Machine – Chrome Web Store
- [Wayback/Archive] Archive Page – Chrome Web Store
- Bookmarklet to save a page both in the WayBack machine and Archive.is (ending on the latter to solve a reCAPTCHA)
- [Wayback/Archive] lanl/Zotero-Robust-Links-Extension: Create Robust Links from within Zotero
Other organisations active on GitHub:
- [Wayback/Archive] IIPC (by [Wayback/Archive] International Internet Preservation Consortium – IIPC)
- [Wayback/Archive] Archives Unleashed (by [Wayback/Archive] Welcome to the Archives Unleashed Project)
Our goal is to make petabytes of historical internet content accessible to scholars and others interested in the recent past.
- [Wayback/Archive] Web Archives for Historical Research (by [Wayback/Archive] Web Archives for Historical Research Group | University of Waterloo)
Our goal is linking history and big data to give historians the tools required to find and interpret digital sources from web archives.
- [Wayback/Archive] Webrecorder
Webrecorder Project
by [Wayback/Archive] Webrecorder
Webrecorder provides a suite of open source tools and packages to capture interactive websites and replay them at a later time as accurately as possible. Learn more about our key tools and efforts
Via:
- [Wayback/Archive] Michele Weigle on Twitter: “@jpluimers @waybackmachine Thanks for adding the links to my thread and some of our blog posts. I noticed you had Wayback and Archive links as well. You might be interested in Robust Links (which does something similar using JavaScript).”
- [Wayback/Archive] Martin Klein on Twitter: “@jpluimers @weiglemc @waybackmachine We have developed a Zotero extension:
github.com/lanl/Zotero-Robust-Links-Extension/…
and a Robust Links API for further connections:
robustlinks.mementoweb.org/api-docsHTH” - [Wayback/Archive] v1m (infosec.exchange/@v1m) on Twitter: “Here is a list of archive sites which will save precious web content:
mementoweb.org/depotCame across @permacc projectperma.ccIt tries to solve https://t.co/3eouMuael3 @cjr. But @mementoweb ‘s FREErobustlinks.mementoweb.orgseems to be a similar solution.” - [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on Twitter: “This is cool! RobustLinks by @Mementoweb finds a URL with caption in @waybackmachine or @archiveis, then gives back amended a elements with both original and versioned plus style that renders based on the JavaScript plus CSS (& allows to navigate to original or versioned).”
–jeroen






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