Archiving Freelance Internet Writing
January 5, 2010 6:26 AM Subscribe
How do freelance web writers/journalists archive their published work for portfolios or C.V.s or other reasons?
Let's say I want to create a portfolio or resume that has links to my published work on the internet, but I know that over time many of the links will become obsolete as the sites I was published on remove outdated articles. Is there a tool or site that exists that lets you somehow cache your published work as a web page or otherwise allows you to continue to link to web versions of your published work? What I'm trying to avoid is having to create screen grabs or pdfs of my work...I'd rather have a portfolio that's just links.
Let's say I want to create a portfolio or resume that has links to my published work on the internet, but I know that over time many of the links will become obsolete as the sites I was published on remove outdated articles. Is there a tool or site that exists that lets you somehow cache your published work as a web page or otherwise allows you to continue to link to web versions of your published work? What I'm trying to avoid is having to create screen grabs or pdfs of my work...I'd rather have a portfolio that's just links.
I'm just trying out Wordpress for a similar purpose-- supposedly there are all sorts of "pages" you can add as well as links. Cheaper than a website (free, in fact).
posted by pippin at 8:13 AM on January 5, 2010
posted by pippin at 8:13 AM on January 5, 2010
I use a program called HTTrack (their website wasn't loading for me, so I linked to Wiki) -- it will copy down the HTML and images and pretty much everything else required to view a webpage or entire website locally. It also rewrites the urls found in the pages so that they point to a local source, which would include re-uploading to another server; I used it once to create version of a website that I could burn to CDROM for local viewing. When it comes to archiving writing, every so often I load saved settings for someplace I've written for and start copying just in case the website disappears someday. If it's a particularly large website, it could take days to run a full download (especially if they use mod_rewrite to make fancy URLs which duplicate content under different URLs), but it does include some abilities to restrict the scope of what you want archived. Even then, sometimes the spider runs wild and starts archiving pages that you linked to, and then pages that those linked to, etc. , but it's not too hard to interrupt it, tweak settings, and start over.
posted by AzraelBrown at 10:09 AM on January 5, 2010
posted by AzraelBrown at 10:09 AM on January 5, 2010
From a marketing perspective, you don't want to send your prospective editors away from your site, but keep them there so they'll look at more of your work. For that reason, and the dead URL problem, and from an SEO perspective ("writers on topic X"), it's better to host your work on your site.
HTMLized plain-text version of copy
PDF of print/web site's original presentation with art/etc
link to original URL ("originally appeared at ...") and/or archive.org cached copy.
Most publications are happy to allow such reproduction, but you should check with your editor just in case.
(I've done a number of author/writer websites)
posted by joshwa at 10:30 AM on January 5, 2010
Most publications are happy to allow such reproduction, but you should check with your editor just in case.
(I've done a number of author/writer websites)
posted by joshwa at 10:30 AM on January 5, 2010
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I'm basically going to duplicate sites I author in flat html or other way on my own website, somedomain.com/portfolio for example.
posted by tilde at 6:38 AM on January 5, 2010