 We started right away here. So today our topic is, where will your website be in 20 years? And our speaker is Jacob Burma. Thank you so much. I am thrilled that you guys came. Can I just get a show of hands? How many of you would consider yourselves primarily website designers? OK, thank you. Awesome. You and me. How about content writers, content creators? OK, lots of you. Fascinating. What about developers? A lot of developers. Lovely. OK. Surprise. But that's wonderful. My hope today is that you get a good hack out of this next talk. Maybe there's something you'll see that you haven't seen before that may be useful for you. What good is a conference if you don't have one? And speaking of which, I'm just going to put, I've talked to organizers, and they gave me permission to take the WordCamp Vancouver 2023 website and save it for not just 20 years, but 200 years. I did that this morning, and it just needs one more file. I'm just going to go in here. I'm going to hit Advanced. I'm going to make a manifest. I'll call it Permasite. I'm going to hit Next. I'm going to put it in that folder, create it. And it's free, and we're going to just keep that kind of in the oven, and we'll come back to it at the end of the talk. So where will your website be in 20 years? I have a bunch of slides. I had fun making them. I am a designer. And they're all available at my website, vibrantcontent.ca, slash WordCamp. So if you don't want to take notes, you can just go grab that later. So that should be fine. Today, I'm going to be talking about link rot. Now, that's not maybe a popular topic, but it actually has some significance. As I thought about link rot, there are two aspects to this. One is broken links on a site. This happens if, like in WordPress, you go to your permalink structure and you change it, which you should probably never do. But if you do, and you don't redirect all of those links, all of your links, go away the contents there. If people come to your homepage, they can find it. But the links are broken. Second, more nefarious type, is when the actual web content has changed, and someone didn't pay their hosting bill, and the site goes away, or pages are taken down. So not only did the links not work, the content is actually not discoverable online. To me, that's the easy two ways to think about link rot. And at first glance, like, who cares, really? My website has some 404s. Your websites have 404s. Not a big deal. Wikipedia has the odd 404. But I think there's something beneath the surface. Broken and rotten links are a minor annoyance. But underneath, they chip away at the assumption that the internet is forever. I think instead the internet's like a huge glacier, and it looks frozen in time, something that will last forever, but it's always, always moving, and big chunks of it are calving into the ocean all the time. I love these graphics from perma.cc. When we launch a site, that's that first image there, with no little red dots, that links are healthy. If a client notices a busted link, they'll tell us about it, and so the site goes live and everything works. And then about a year later, over 20% of sighted links may be dead or otherwise inaccessible according to their research. In five years, it gets worse. About 50% of sighted links can be affected. Again, this is kind of beyond your control. These are things that you're linking out to. And then as time goes on, link rot is inevitable. It continues and rarely reverses. How far does link rot go? Here, it's really hard to get Canadian-only statistics, but here's what I found, specifically for the U.S. 20% of all science, math, or medicine, technology articles, the links are rotten right now. 50% of sighted links in U.S. Supreme Court opinions are inaccessible. 70% of sighted links in legal journals are gone. That makes me wonder why AI is maybe hallucinating in legal findings, because all the links are broken. And then there are various estimates. I got 72% to 98% of all content on the internet gone in 20 years. That means all the work we've done, the sites we've built, where will your website be in 2043? Well, chances are it'll be gone. And in some way, good riddance. Some of it needs to go. I don't miss Netscape, and the world will survive cat memes. But in other way, it is a shame. And I wanted to just talk for a moment about my origin story with WordPress. About 15 years ago, I was living in Toronto. I was working for a mid-sized charity with about 20 employees. And at that point, I was the communications director. And one of the jobs I had to do was to build a website. So we found this high-end agency. They worked with the Toronto Raptors. They charged us like they work for the Toronto Raptors. It was a six-figure price tag for a mid-sized charity website. We worked for nine months, tons of meetings. At the end of it, they were pleased to show a shell. It was a gradient on the homepage. It was a logo on the upper corner. It was about eight pages in the main nav, all of which were blank. Now it's time for you to put the content in. Like, are you kidding? Where in the 80-page contract did I see that you actually weren't gonna put any contact in the website that we were making? And it was back in the day when boards used to show up for web launches. I'd say inconceivable now. But here's the board flying in a few days. And I've got this shell that I've got to present to them. And it was panic mode. It was day and night. I never made a website. Like, what are you kidding? And I have their proprietary CMS that's horrendous. And I'm trying to put some photos in. And it was basically garbage. But I didn't get fired by the board. And I just came to the end of the experience. I was like, there has got to be a better way to make websites for charities than what I experienced. It felt like 90 minutes of work that they did. And then like days and days of my life. Then I found WordPress. And I started vibrant content. And we're trying to be that better way for mid-sized charities. And we've had fun clients from Rawls and Bobway to Urban Mongolia. And it's been amazing to work with them. And my kind of the main clients I'm working with now are research institutions. And I just wanted to talk through the lifecycle of a research website. So in the background is an actual one that has faded from the world part of that 98% that is gone. This is a Canadian professor who's well known. He contacted his professor friends in the UK and the US. And they wanted to study ideology and how ideological conflict leads to geopolitical conflict, a really important topic. This was even pre-Ukrainian Russia. So he applies for grant funding from the government. They get the grant. Huzzah, hires a bunch of grad students. They give us a small pile of money to make a website. And then their hands off with creative. It's so fun, designer friend, because they're not going to give you a lot of input. You kind of get to do what you want. They paid us to host and maintain the website for three years, three years later. My colleague sends them a hosting bill, crickets. Doesn't get paid. I follow up. Oh, the grant, it's empty. We can't pay you anything else. They need about $75 a month to keep the lights on for the site. All that research. So we shut it down. And the professor was on to the next grant. And it was so pointless, all this money, all this research, all this time for a site that lived 1,000 days online and then disappeared and no one can see it anymore. And it was link rot at its worst. So that's my own experience with it. And I wanted to just kind of frame the rest of the talk with that. And we're going to move on to how do you solve some of these link rot problems. So I'm going to shift this talk from problem to solution. Start with the basics. What's a 404? An error when a web page can't be found. Some of you in this room may have coded plugins that fix 404s. So this may be repetitive for you. But for those of you who are new or looking for a way to stop link rot at step one, here's what you can do. I think the cool thing about 404s is that they show what pages users are looking for and can't find. So if you fix a 404, it's like, oh, this is what my users want to see. It's also great for your SEO. The sad thing about actually doing 404 work is it becomes an exercise and like, oh, look at all these PHP files that malicious bots are trying to find and can't find on my website. And that's like 90% of what you find when you do 404 research. But it's still worth doing. And there are many WordPress plugins to help you with it. I'm still a fan of the Redirection plugin. It's cheap and cheerful. It's free. It'll find your 404s. And you can fix them. However, it does tend to go wild with 404 logging. And you can bloat your site with that log. And you've got to watch for that. AIO SEO, sorry I misspelled that. And the Yoast SEO are both premium plugins. If you pay them a bit, then they can check your 404s and sometimes even automatically fix them. I'm also a fan of server redirects for the fix. It's just a lot faster to hit the server and go to the right place than hit the server, go to the site, go to the plugin, and then get to the right place. So I'd recommend that if you have a choice and your server and your host allows it. OK, so let's go up a level. What about external 404s? OK, so what if you want users to not hit a 404 when they leave your site? OK, we don't have a lot of control over this. In one sense, you probably don't care. It's not your problem. But in other sense, if it's Supreme Court citations, it does matter. And you'd want people to actually hit the content that you're citing. So here are a couple good references for that. I talked about Permacix before. It's a project of Harvard Library. It's easy to use. It's going to make you an HTML copy of a single page and a screenshot. It's kind of like a faster internet archive. The downside is you just get 10 links for free, and then you have to start paying. So if you have an academic site with tons of links, Permacix might not be the one for you. Here's another new tool, Archive Forever. I'm actually going to do a quick live demo of this. And we'll see how this works. So Archive Forever is developed on top of RWE, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And it is a free tool for now. I'm just going to take the home page of my website. I'm going to copy it. And I'm going to toss it in Archive Forever. And I'm going to include the screenshot. Why not? I'm going to hit Archive. And it's going to do a little work. And it's going to think about it. And then hopefully within a few minutes, it should give me a permanent URL of the screenshot. Now I missed the JavaScript, and I missed some other stings. But it did get something. And let's see if it's got the Archive page as well. OK, so it did well in the Archive page. And you can see this is a huge, long, ugly URL with RWE in the middle. But it functions. And RWE would say it's around for 200 years. And that's a permanent, permanent link that you can always go to. So that's a fun tool that's totally free for now. It hasn't been monetized and fairly new. OK, let's go up one more level. We've talked about 4.4 on your own site, individual pages on other sites, what about whole websites and saving them for long periods of time? OK, we're getting to the heart of it. Here are the options thin out. You know about the Wayback machine. It is an amazing tool. 7, excuse me, 840 billion saved web pages. Now, hands up if you have ever lost a page on a site and rebuilt it by looking at the way. Yes, you have. OK, that was a page. Hands up if you've ever lost an entire site, had to. Oh yes, you and me. I have been there. It's paid, but it's awesome to be able to be like, how did I make that? And then trying to guess from the Wayback machine. So it is a lifesaver. However, it's limited scope. Sometimes when they get one screenshot, I was trying to check a site and go down a level and get to their PDF. And you're just not going to find that on the Wayback machine. And it's low. So beautiful resource. And I hope it continues. But it does have its limitations. Now, WordPress, as you may know, is getting into the permanent game. Pay them $38,000 US dollars, and they will give you 100 years of domain hosting and website hosting. I don't know if there's a line out the door for that one. OK, so is there a better way? Enter our Weave. This is a new protocol that I've learned about. Store data for long periods of time. It's a permanent data storage platform. OK, so that's intriguing. My old business model is based on recurring revenue because I came to WordCamp, and they told me to charge clients every month. And I started doing it, and they were right. But what if I could pay once and store a site for hundreds of years? That's kind of a game changer. So I started exploring Our Weave during the pandemic as an arbitrage of my own business, and my own business model. And eventually, you got to know some of the early teams that were here at Our Weave, and one ended up as a client, Our Drive, which is kind of like a dropbox for Our Weave, which you saw at the very top. So how does Our Weave work? Well, it's blockchain-based. So I got other blockchain products, projects. It's decentralized. It's self-sovereign. It's mutably time-stamped. But whereas Bitcoin's blockchain kind of just marches along in a straight line one black after another into a chain of blocks, Our Weave uses what's called a block weave, which is a multi-directional, multi-stranded weave of data that's optimized for data storage and a very high redundancy. So as I understand it, if you upload a file to Our Weave within a matter of hours, you can have around 800 replicas around the world. So right now, there's about 150 terabytes of data on the weave, but including all the replicas, the network size is something like 92 petabytes, like just massive redundancy for all the files that get uploaded. And they check the integrity of your file every 15 seconds and would say they have the highest level of data validation currently available. And all of that makes it really, really hard to delete files that are put on Our Weave because they're all over the place, and they're copied, and they're everywhere. So Our Weave says they'll store your file for 200 years for a single price. But how do they pay people for two centuries? So that's the second part of their equation, the endowment. So when you upload a file, a big portion of that price goes into an endowment the way that big universities, like UBC Sotter School, probably has an endowment that pays the professors year after year. Our Weave's endowment will pay data stores into the future. And we can talk more about that in the Q&A if you want to dig into that. So there's been big growth in the platform since 2018, but who's using it, why haven't I heard of it? It's mostly been some niche developers that have made gateway software or permanent data leaks or lots of infrastructure projects so far. It's also proved to be fairly popular in China because it eludes the great firewall. There's no one server a government can shut down because it's multi-polar. Digital scrapbooking has been another use case early on where people can see their family photos for generations and there are some business use cases because some businesses, you have to keep your files for seven years or 20 years or 50 years and so if you can put them onto Our Weave, you know that they're around and you don't have to sweat it. So it's still early days in this technology and I would say if you want to deep dive, look up Sam Williams and listen to one of his podcasts or talks. I have some personal objections to Our Weave having been around the ecosystem for a while that I'll just share briefly here as we get into this. There's an economic objection that I've kind of, it's in my mind. So Our Weave is a crypto project and it's dependent on the AR token which is the native token of the Our Weave ecosystem but how reliable is this token that they made? Well, I suppose the answer is time will tell. It is one of the larger projects in the crypto ecosystem and the endowment is designed to account for fluctuations in the value of their currency but I think the objection still has some merit and is worth considering. I also have a bit of Betamax syndrome about the Our Weave project. If you aren't familiar with that or weren't alive then Betamax was a competitor to VHS. It was better tech in almost every respect from Sony. However, it lost the popularity context to VHS and now if you go into the back aisle of any thrift store in Canada, you see VHS tapes and not Betamax so that's the legacy. Basically the best tech does not win the day and that could be the same here. Time will tell. Now here's an interesting nuance that you should understand about Our Weave. So Our Weave promises to store your data permanently for a one time price. They do not promise to give you access to it permanently. Wait, what's the difference? Okay, someone explained it to me this way. Let's say you're moving out of your apartment and you're going away on a long trip. You go to your friend who has a garage and you say, hey, will you store my stuff for a while? I'll give you a hundred bucks. And your friend's like, sure, no problem. You go on your trip, it's great. You come back, you're like, hey friend, I had a great trip. Oh, by the way, I need to see some of my stuff. And your friend's like, whoa, whoa, buddy, you just paid me to store your stuff, not to actually let you get to it again. I mean, that's like, you want to get to the stuff that it's actually yours. So, you know, and an alternate version of this, you go to your friend's house, but they're just never home and you could just never get in to actually get to your stuff. So either way, I think there is a gap here in the Our Weave world. I think they're aware of it. If you are a developer, like many of you in the room, there are open source gateway tools so you can kind of make your own key and then you can have your own kind of pipeline to get to your own permanent data if you want. But for those of us who aren't developers, there's an objection that I still have and a concern. Lastly, Emerging Competitors in 2023, Our Weave is not the only person starting to talk about permanent data storage and poke on people's frustrations about monthly subscriptions for hosting. There's another player out of India, Lighthouse Storage that uses an endowment model very similar to Our Weave, but builds on Filecoin and also the digital scrapbooking category, there's forever.com. But both of those options, as far as I know, or just for file storage, they actually won't store whole websites for long periods of time for a single price. Here's where I land. I think the objections to Our Weave are very real, but I also think it shows some promise and it's probably the only protocol today to have a serious claim on permanent data. So I think it is still a helpful tool to deter Linkrot. So now we're gonna kind of move from that introduction of various ways to store things online for a long period of time to a demo of how do you actually do this? How do you make a permacite and upload it for a long period of time? I'm calling this 10 steps to permanence. As far as I know, this isn't anywhere online. These are things that our small agency has just kind of come up with trial and error and this happens to work and it happens to be good for clients and I will share some of the applications you could use with clients towards the end. So this is what we do and the final goal is to have like you just saw that one page, a permacite and you can compare that if you wish, our current site, vibrantcontent.ca to an entire permacite I put in and minified the long, long URL to tiny.cc slash vibrantcontent. I paid 24 cents to do that. It was a pretty good deal. The site works fine and I'll show you at the end how we got to that. So there's a few tools. Our Weave is primarily for developers but there are a few consumer-facing tools out there. DragonDeploy, Archive Forever, RDrive, Acord. I'm gonna use RDrive because I'm most familiar with it and I think it's probably the best tool in this case. Here are the 10 steps and then I'll walk through what we did at the very top with that one file. First, you're gonna build a static site. Now, this permacite is not going to be a fully functional WordPress site with the entire backend so your contact forms aren't gonna work. It might not work for e-commerce. There may be ways around that but at this point with this particular hack it is gonna be a static site. It's gonna grab your JavaScript so there may be moving things on your webpage but it's not actually going to be a full WordPress site so that's apples to oranges a bit with what WordPress is offering but it is still pretty remarkable. Next, you make an account. It's pretty straightforward but you need to know it's self-sovereign data so there's no corporation involved that can reset your password if it's lost. You not your keys, not your files. So you've got to take control of your own. I mean, the nice thing is no one's looking at what you're doing and you really have it all to yourself. Really, your own data. Next, you're gonna go to our drive and you're gonna create a drive. I think I showed that earlier. It's just a matter of going to the big new button and then as simple as creating a new drive right there and you can name it. Now, at this point all drives have to be public. You cannot make a site private and have it fully functional and operating for 200 years. That may come later but at this point any site you put up is gonna have to be public which means you might want to think carefully about what the future of humanity will see from our world. Fourth, top-up. So you're gonna need to pay up until about maybe two months ago you had to have the AR native token to be able to do any perm-a-webbing putting stuff on the permanent web. That's changed. Now you can use a credit card and I think the minimum spend is five bucks and so as an example, the site that I did, you get about a gigabyte for $3 Canadian and my site which the static files are 71 megs became 0.03 credits and 24 cents. So you need to kind of feed the machine but the nice thing is that you can actually do that and you don't have to find a crypto exchange that will actually give you this token anymore. Makes it a lot easier. So it's four or five is upload that bunch of static files that you got with one of those tools either offline pages pro or static site. I didn't talk about those too much. I found that offline pages pro which is a Mac thing, works pretty well and tends to do a really nice faithful copy of sites but static site, yes, the static site generator also is good and there are many other tools that work with the CLI that you could use if you want. Simply static was the other one, yeah. So now that you've done that, you wait. So part of this process is when you upload files not like Dropbox or Google Cloud where you upload things and they're pretty quickly available, in general, you'll need to wait, maybe it's a minute, maybe it's 10, even 30 minutes depending on how busy the network is to be able to have your files mined and propagated in many different places. So there is a bit of a waiting game and what you wanna look for is that yellow dot to become a green dot which means you're good to go and everything's been mined. Step seven is what I did at the beginning. It's creating a manifest. This is the special sauce. This is what combines all the perma files into one site. It's what I did at the beginning of the talk. Now, you have a lot more, they have a CLI for our drive for the developers in the room and you can do some extra special things in terms of what you want your manifest to be able to combine together and you can probably even put some functionality in there where people could use things like contact forms or potentially e-commerce to be able to do more with your manifest but this is just like out of the box if you're not a developer, this is what you can make. Trick is, I'm just gonna note this and again, this is trial and error from us messing around with this and figuring it out. The trick is you wanna make sure that manifest is in the same place as your index.html file which is like the key to a static site. You click on that and you get the home page. So just make sure your manifest goes there or it's gonna manifest nothing. It's gonna kinda go crazy. So we'll have a look at that in a second. After you did the manifest, you need to wait again because that file now needs to mine and it needs to turn green light and then finally we can preview it. Let's see what happens and if our manifest is, it still looks like it's yellow but that could just be that it hasn't refreshed and let's see if anything has come from this and if we have, oh, there it is. We're Camp Vancouver, yay. And you can see the huge, long, ugly URL up there and if I click on another one, the same long, ugly URL with and about HTMLs on the end and that looks great. So now this site's been safe for 200 years for 24 cents. So that's pretty cool. Huzzah, there you go. And there's the URL. You can minify that as I did. Now let's talk about a few things. Heads up, what do you need to know? Can no delete button, like it's up. It's not coming down, it's all over the place now. Number two, no password reset. I'll just say that yet again. Make sure that you keep your password where you want it. Static sites only, I'm not full word pressed yet. And I have had an experience where we tried to do a site which had Chinese characters in the URL. It's fine if you have non-English characters on the actual page but if those Chinese characters in the URL, it's probably gonna go sideways and it might not work. And then permanence takes patience. You're gonna have to wait a little bit. What are the applications for doing this? Well, goodbye sites. So if you've had a website end or you're refreshing a website, something you can say to a client is, hey, for X dollars, we'll create you a permanent version of your site that you can always have for reference. And a lot of our clients really love that. Like they wanna be able to reference. Especially what happens if you have a huge site and then a client wants to trim it down and be like, I wanna site this 25% the size and there's a lot of stuff I wanna get rid of. But then two weeks later they're like, well, what was on my old site? What was that file? Just make them a permit site. And they're like, X dollars, I'll make you a copy that you can always access and you don't have to make it live. It can just live on our weave and then you can just go and always have a reference for it. There's not another good way to do that. Okay, client, thank you, same thing. You've had a long relationship with the client. Say a researcher and there, yes, the project's ending, that's so sad. And then you can surprise them with a thank you. Oh, you know what? We just, we decided to save your site forever and you can get back to it. Our agency now will build this actually into the contract. So when we talk to researchers like, here's phase one, you're gonna pay for hosting and then when your thing is done and your grant funding is done, there's kind of like a last payment for turning this into a permanent site that then you can keep. And they've been very appreciative of that and then they wouldn't know that their work isn't gonna disappear with the grant. PERMA backups, so I'm sure many of you have good daily backups on your servers. I'm sure many of you hopefully have offsite backups. So if your server goes sideways, you've got one. Well, why not make 800 backups for cheap? So this, you don't necessarily even have to do a manifest for this. Like you don't have to create the file and have the working website. It can just be a static copy or it can just be your WordPress files. So we do that regularly and just make PERMA backups just in case things go sideways. So yeah, and I would also say for developers, I am not one, but from talking to other developers, they would say, what if your code repositories, you know, were permanently available? You didn't have to rely on GitHub. You didn't have to rely on a PHP server. What if you could make apps and plugins where users got to choose the version they wanted because all the versions were available permanently. That's starting to happen. Some people really get attached to an old version of an app or like functionality or it was before the ads came in. What if you could be like, I like the Instagram before the ads and I wanna use that version of it. Well, there's some cool new potential with what the PERMA web could mean for apps. What if there's a WordPress plugin you could press a button and have a static site generated and automatically sent to the PERMA web and then you could just kind of make a small payment and be able to do backups right from with WordPress. Or what if all of WordPress could be hosted there and you could get a version that you liked and use it because it was already hosted and you could generate sites from that. Those things don't exist yet, but I think we're starting to see the beginning of what permanent data could mean and it could be a big game changer for how we work on sites in the future. So if any of that's interesting, I'm happy to think about that or talk about that in Q&A. I will say I'm not a developer so I'm not gonna be able to go too deep into the technicals. So the current internet connects us across vast geographical distance. We have clients in Zimbabwe, Mongolia, that places I've never been before that it's been so fun to get into their worlds. What if this permanent data thing could connect us across vast spans of time so that people will never meet in the future can actually connect to us in our world here. I suppose that time will tell where that happens. So thank you, I appreciate your attention and if you have any questions either on Linkrot or some of the solutions I've talked about or Arweave or wanna see kind of the steps of how we did those 10 steps to permanence I am available for that. Do you have the address for your presentation? Yes I do, it's here on the bottom of the Q&A. Fibrantcontent.ca slash word camp are the 10 steps and you're free to fill out my contact form if you get stuck and you're like that didn't work I missed step six or I didn't wait for this, that's fine just let me know. Yes. I know you said you're not like a developer but just based on your own experience how like secure in terms of privacy or data depth do you believe this is? Yeah I think in my experience so again all of these are public so all the websites I'm putting up are things that anyone who figures out that giant URL or gets a copy of it can see and it's not gonna go away. So there's no privacy and I think Arweave by default is public and open because it's meant to be that kind of record. However with our drive there is another encryption layer and they would say it's like military grade and pretty secure and you can actually set your own password for individual drive so I showed you a public drive for those sites you can also make private drives that only you have on not only the password to get into your account but a second password to get into just that drive and that content. So yeah I find that's fairly secure. Personally I've put a lot of my family photos in private drives just so they're available for future generations. That was exactly the next question. I would transfer everything from let's say my cloud into this. I feel it is but here's the thing. I find that there's like a cost comparison like if you're going to put over 100 gigs maybe even 50 gigs whatever or even up to a terabyte like I think once you start hitting maybe over 200 gigs, 300 gigs the price can get very high to make it permanent data and it may not be like you paid monthly but you'd have a pretty big major cost up front. So I find it's best for like your most valuable files or your most special files. I don't think it's at a point where it can be a complete replacement for Dropbox or Google Cloud but the integration is coming. I think if we're here next year I might have a different story. Yeah. Let's say somebody stored something in the websites but legally with a code order who can delete it? Yeah so that has happened. There have been takedown requests for copy protective material that has already been put up on the perm web and oh sorry I'm gonna repeat the question. I was supposed to be doing that earlier. So the question was if there's a court order or a cease and desist letter that legally is sent from a jurisdiction and someone has put something up permanently can it be deleted? The answer is yes with difficulty and I know they have run into there was a cease and desist letter from I think a major record label cause some copy protected content was put up and made available and what you have to do is you can't coordinate those 800 copies. You can't actually get rid of those but you can coordinate the gateway. So the guy who was in my little parable who was storing your friend's stuff and he had the garage you basically have to talk to that guy and say okay just don't serve that URL for that content and they have a content moderation. Like they wanna be as permissionless as possible and open but I know that there've already been some cases where they've had to just like the data's still there on somebody's hard drive but you can't get to it cause the URL's down. Yes. These URLs are actually searched by any engines or are they kind of off? Yes they are starting to be indexed by Google but they're obviously they are like the least SEO friendly things you could possibly make cause they're word sell they're basically cryptographic hashes that are put around a central our we've or another gateway URL. So yes I've heard that they are being indexed and cashed by Google it's got almost a second layer. There's also kind of a new like Google for the perm-a-web to be able to search content like that's just come out in the last month or so but it's not something you're gonna stumble upon necessarily. There's also a thing of drive sharing so if like I've created this public drive of a few websites that I like and they say permanently I can share that whole public drive as a single file like or a single link so I can just create one and I can share it as I want to so that's another way that the content can be shared but as of now no most major search engines I think Brave might be interested in some integration if you've heard of the Brave browser cause they tend to be more crypto friendly they'll probably be the first one to have some search capacity for the perm-a-web. Can we use it for like a git repo? Yes, yeah, yeah that's the thing then you're not as tied to having to pay GitHub or hosted or anything like that yes so the git that's I think what developers are excited about is like I don't have to pay monthly or whatever or rely on this I can just have it permanently there so yes, yes. And you said once it's in there it can't be edited but if I want a new version of my site it'll have to be new. It would have to be new and you'd have to push it so yeah I was thinking about this scenario in fact talking to my friend about it earlier today so in it's funny so we have and you might have these clients too where for three or four years they have not changed a thing on their site you're like why are you paying me every month for a site you can change that you're not changing like it is literally not changing so we went to one of our clients and we're like yeah she's a former vice president of World Vision Canada and she does consulting and you know she just hadn't changed her site and we weren't sure what she was like well let's just make it permanent and then you don't have to worry about it. In the end she was like oh it kind of poked her to be like oh no I want to make some changes I want to do some things so what can you how can you do that now again the technology doesn't exist to be able to have WordPress hosted permanently I think that's coming and something I'm interested in seeing happen I would love to talk to developers about but what I think you could do is if you're getting a decent amount of traffic and you're paying for that traffic you could have the permacite be the one getting the traffic and then you could just have a local copy or a copy on your server of the one that you know and when they want to make a change you just generate new static files and put them up so that could be possible but again you have some long early URLs you'd want to do domain masking you'd have to push that out a little bit to be able to have it be like a coherent high traffic site but it's a really good for those sites that don't change or that you want to kind of archive it's a good it's a good option you mentioned domain masking is it like your SEO that's a great question where you kind of minimize by using you pretty much use domain masking to direct them yes yes I did and I just used a free tool tiny cc but you presumably work with your DNS and if they're DNS experts they're welcome to chime in on how can you could do that and it may not be the best for your SEO but it would be cheap it would be real cheap any other questions yes I guess I'm not sure if this would be a common question for other people but eventually you get to the point in your life where you start to think about estate planning yes and if you've been in development and stuff you've got these websites and other things out there and it already is quite a trend in terms of estate planning in terms of getting rid of your digital footprint yeah I guess when I didn't solve this top pedigree I thought oh maybe this is going to be the one that's going to give the answer the whole thing blows apart because your domain addresses are they're just rental yes yep exactly and as far as whatever's private once you're gone who could if not for the public but it doesn't really sound like this is fully going to address that now no there would be a few interesting potential use cases like you could have a private drive like thinking about your will or passwords or things you could have those on a private drive and give just the key and so you die and someone gets a private drive with all your personal stuff and has access to it there actually is an early consumer facing app called Sarcophagus that is designed for that so I think it I forget how it works if it pings you or it looks for activity to make sure you're alive online and then if it doesn't get it then it automatically releases the data you want it to release to a trusted person so that's kind of like next generation will planning or digital estate planning so Sarcophagus our we've Sarcophagus might be interesting to look at because they're they're trying to figure out they have a mechanism for mortality to make sure you're alive I forget what it is I just want to give it more for how to sort of launch the websites and let them go free now into the web oh okay oh yeah yeah yeah if there was something that would automatically take your websites off of domains and then kind of make permanent versions like in a timed way that'd be interesting so they wouldn't all the domains expire and the websites all die after you yeah that certainly could be a use case yeah interesting yes there's a way that when a page is not available and you want to show 404 instead you kind of redirect to that static copy that would be interesting I guess you would need your 404 to be intelligent enough to go to the right place but what you yeah what you maybe could do because I know there's some 404 redirection plugins and WordPress that just like every 404 goes to the homepage like what if every 404 went to the permacopy so you could definitely you know explore the archive version and you have like you make the permacopy with like a top bar across the top like this is an archive version of the site to get back to the original press here and so someone could like you'd create an internet archive for yourself kind of thing but instead of the internet archive it would be a searchable website that you could go through that's it really interesting use case I never thought of appreciate your creativity yes you mentioned endowment can you elaborate on that yes sure happy to from what again this is just from what I know being around the community so the R.R. Weave team looked at the price of data storage over the last like 30 years and as we know it's what that that rule in computer science someone refreshed me where the every number of years you get the same amount of data for half the price so they found the percentage was 35% year on year for the same amount of data storage it cost 35% less on average now when I read that was like my hosting bill is not going down 35% every year somebody's making more money every year off of me so what they have done with the endowment is they're not assuming that hosting costs will be static they're assuming that in 20, 40, 200 years it's going to be a lot cheaper to host a 71 meg size site than it is today but they have pegged it at 0.5% decline so it's a very gentle slope down and anything above 0.5% means that it's longer length of time so the endowment is designed like if if the world keep going and computer stores get cheaper and cheaper slowly then you get 200 years of storage if it really dips and it's more like oh yeah 10% and there's these advances and quantum computing and all that stuff then they would say the storage time goes out because the endowment has more in it to support longer storage so that's kind of and there's a you can do a deep dive on they have like a yellow paper that goes in the mechanics of it but that's what I understand from the endowment and how they continue to have funds to pay out for a number of years wonderful. Well thank you all I appreciate this and if any of you experiment with this and have any discoveries please contact me I'd love to hear what you learn.