Wayback Machine Plugin for ALL old/dead outbound links on a website?

March 6, 2009 1:19 AM

My old website still gets a lot of hits. But many of the outbound links I posted years back are no longer valid, are dead or have changed location. Is there any way to integrate the Wayback Machine Internet Archive into my site's code so that links are redirected to the archive for the date they were originally posted?

Ideally I would like an integrated plugin that directed old outbound links to their archived page on Wayback automatically. It would be great if visitors to the site hardly even knew their click had been redirected. I would like to implement it site-wide, so that either:

1. All outbound links were directed to the original date they were posted, or
2. If links are dead then the plugin kicks in and directs to the wayback archive, or
3. The plugin places a Wayback version of each link next to the original (something like: Original Link [archive])

(My site is a self-hosted blogger blog - the old version - if that makes a difference...)

Is there a way?

posted by bollockovnikov to computers & internet (4 comments total)

You might have to roll your own on this one.

It's pretty easy to do this in javascript by adding a function to the base template that adds an archive URL with the year/month (which is all the wayback machine requires IIRC) derived from the post date to the beginning of each link within a typical post div.

I just knocked out some code to do it in a current blogger template as a proof of concept, but I don't know how Old Version formatting or templating is different. Obviously, it won't work if javascript is turned off.

MeFiMail me a link to your blog so I can have a look if you think this solution might work for you.
posted by Sparx at 3:44 AM on March 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

You should e-mail the archive.org help alias. They're very helpful people.
posted by jeffamaphone at 10:30 AM on March 6, 2009

If you import your blog into Wordpress (which is pretty simple to do), there are link checker plugins -- I use broken link checker -- that you could use to identify the problem links and update them.

It's also possible that if you write a couple of the authors of the various broken link plugins that they'll think your idea is a good one (I do) and they'll update the plugin to do just this. If they do, let me know because I'd love to run it as well.
posted by glider at 7:58 PM on March 6, 2009

Final: If anyone is interested in how I solved this problem (with a LOT of help from Sparx) then do please mefimail me.
posted by bollockovnikov at 11:20 AM on March 11, 2009