7 ms·
Show HN: Vandal – an alternate navigator to Wayback Machine
- sanqui 5y agoThis looks great! Would be nice to have a way to see the source collection (e.g. "Save Page Now" or ArchiveBot) for a given capture.
- vigneshanand 5y agoThanks for checking out, sanqui! That's an interesting use case, am curious as to why is that information useful for you?
- toomuchtodo 5y agoData provenance. If it came from Save Page Now, the Internet Archive archived it. If it came from ArchiveBot, ArchiveTeam archived it.
- vigneshanand 5y agoMakes sense . I will dig in to this further. Am sure wayback provides this detail somewhere in it's api.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoSome api docs here that aren’t easy to find: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Nsv52MvSjbLb2PCpHlat0gkzw0EvtSgpKHu4mk0MnrA https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Nsv52MvSjbLb2PCpHlat0gkz... (yes, this is official documentation)
- vigneshanand 5y agoIt's still in draft. likely to change. Also, it's for the save api, won't get the required info there.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoIs there a more canonical url for that doc’s info? Also, is the CDX api the proper endpoint for Wayback provenance data?
- vigneshanand 5y agoDon't know. However, You can keep track of the issue here: https://github.com/vegetableman/vandal/issues/8 https://github.com/vegetableman/vandal/issues/8
- baal80spam 5y agoThis looks cool but I'm always reluctant to install ANY browser addons that "can read and change all your data on the websites you visit". I'll keep in mind this addon exists, though.
- vigneshanand 5y agoI understand. It sounds awful. The use-case here being the built-in browser requires host permissions to all url's for navigation purposes. Removing it causing access issues when navigating to a another page through a link within the webpage.
- pvg 5y agoWouldn't it be easier (if a little less slick-looking) to hang the date selection UI off an extension bar button rather than putting it into the actual web page? Then that permission could potentially be dropped.
- vigneshanand 5y agoThat would indeed work. But the utility of Vandal is to not just support navigation but also to present an alterative vision for time-travel :D.
- anotheryou 5y agocould it be a website instead?
- mrkramer 5y agoThen it would lose browser extension utility or in another words you wouldn't have it under you fingertips ready to use easily at any moment.
- anotheryou 5y ago
- myself248 5y agoI would love a way to skip the selection of a hyper-specific date and time. Most of the time I really do not care whether I'm looking at the page as it existed on March 18th 2006 at 9:13am, or April 21st 2006 at 7:44pm. I just want "take me to 2006". One click. Where in 2006 doesn't matter, just do something for me, it's probably the right thing. If I need to get into more detail, okay, THEN let me pull open a more specific capture picker.
- solarkraft 5y agoVery much so. Usability is not great across archive.org (it has tons of gems, but they’re hard to find organically). My small recurring donation has the explicit goal of improving it, but it looks like that hasn’t happened yet. The greatest Archive of the Internet (and perhaps humanity) deserves a better UI.
- unicornporn 5y agoYou will like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/view-page-archive/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/view-page-arc...
- mattowen_uk 5y agoI use this extension (the Chrome one), and it's really nice in that if the page you navigate to returns a 404 and it still exists in the wayback machine, the 404 page is replaced with a big 'view this on archive.org' button. As someone who is constantly digging deep in the indie-web of personal websites which 50% of the time have long since gone, it's really useful.
- vigneshanand 5y agoMost of the controls in Vandal are designed to allow quick navigation to specific snapshots. But I do see a use case for a feature like "jump to year" .
- beefman 5y agoNamed after Vandal Savage - cool!
- vigneshanand 5y agoyes. haha!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- luke2m 5y ago(Kind of unrelated) What happens if the Internet Archive gets taken down? Does anyone have a mirror of their petabytes of data?
- mateo1 5y agoPersonally I'm afraid that as soon as the wayback machine becomes popular enough, calls for its censorship will start the surface, along with takedown requests for IP. Is there a solution to this other than obscurity?
- chynkm 5y agoNovel idea :)
- mrkramer 5y agoThis is exactly what I need and what I was looking for!