New Kitten Release 🥳

• Implements cascading archives support

https://kitten.small-web.org/reference/#cascading-archives

Cascading archives¹ is useful if you have a static archive of the old version of your site and you don’t want to host it somewhere else and use the 404→307 (evergreen web) technique (https://kitten.small-web.org/reference/#evergreen-web-404-307) (the latter is useful if the old version of your site is a dynamic site and you cannot take a static archive of it).

If a URL cannot be found on your app, Kitten will trying it in the archive folders:

__archive__1
__archive__2
__archive__3

(In that order.)

So you can three older static versions of your site served without breaking older URLs unless they are shadowed by newer URLs in your site/app.

Enjoy!

💕

¹ This is a feature that I originally implemented in Site.js (that’s going to be shut down tomorrow when Let’s Encrypt stops issuing certificates with OCSP-stapling – I don’t have the bandwidth to maintain two servers/frameworks; Kitten is Site.js’s successor). I’m planning on implementing this differently in Kitten going forward (so you can use the Settings interface to upload a zipped archive and it will serve it) but I need this for my own site for tomorrow’s shutdown so we have this simpler implementation in the meanwhile. Leaving things to the last minute? Who? Me? Never! ;)

#Kitten #SmallWeb #SmallTech #archiving #evergreenWeb #dontBreakTheWeb #links #URLs

Ooh, what’s this?… Look Over There!
(With apologies to Jaida Essence Hall)

So the little app I teased earlier is ready and deployed and I have our own instance running at:

https://look-over-there.small-web.org

Look Over There! lets you forward multiple domains to different URLs with full HTTPS support.

Why?

We have a number of older sites that are becoming a chore/expensive to maintain and yet I don’t want to break the web. So I thought, hey, I’ll just use the “url forwarding” feature of my domain registrar to forward them to their archived versions on archive.org.

Ah, not so fast, young cricket… seems some domain registrars’ implementations of this feature do not work if the domain being forwarded is accessed via HTTPS (yes, in 2025).

So, given Kitten¹ uses Auto Encrypt² to automatically provision Let’s Encrypt certificates, I added a domain forwarding feature to it and created Look Over There! as a friendly/simple app that provides a visual interface to it.

To see it in action, hit https://cleanuptheweb.org and you should get forwarded to the archived version of it on archive.org. I’m going to be adding more of our sites to the list in the coming days as part of an effort to reduce my maintenance load and cut down our expenses at Small Technology Foundation.

Since it’s Small Web, this particular instance is just for us. However, you can run your own copy on a VPS (or even a little single-board computer at home, etc.) A link to the source code repository is on the site. Once Domain³ is ready for use (later this year 🤞), setting up your own instance of a Small Web app at your own server will take less than a minute.

I hope this little tool, along with the 404→307 (evergreen web) technique⁴, helps us to nurture an evergreen web and avoid link rot. (And the source code, as little as there is because Kitten does so much for you, is a good resource if you want to learn about Kitten’s new class-based component and page model which I haven’t yet had a chance to properly document.)

Enjoy!

💕

¹ https://kitten.small-web.org
² https://codeberg.org/small-tech/auto-encrypt
³ https://codeberg.org/domain/app
⁴ https://4042307.org

#LookOverThere #Kitten #SmallWeb #SmallTech #web #archiving #evergreenWeb #dontBreakTheWeb #LetsEncrypt #https #TLS #webForwarding #urlForwarding #Domain

This idea from @aral is interesting & in keeping with TBL's rule that Cool URI's Don't Change (https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI).

Not sure how I feel about this approach, though. I agree that existing links should (almost) never break, but I think I prefer to do the curation work to make old links go to equivalent new content, rather than preserving & exposing old pages.

Maybe that's just because my old versions are more embarrassingly clunky than other people’s.

#EvergreenWeb
https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/113520752059437170

Hey web devs, not breaking links doesn’t have to be hard…

Heard of the 404 → 307 technique? (Well, now you have!)

https://4042307.org/

🌲

#evergreenWeb #web #dev

https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/my-final-round-of-url-rewrites-ever.html

#EvergreenWeb (https://sitejs.org) and #ArchivalCascades seem important but complicated for sites....

The Evergreen Web section in Kitten’s¹ settings now has its own page too (and uses Kitten’s new Streaming HTML² workflow).

If you have the previous version of your site up somewhere, you can use the 404-to-307 technique³ to forward missing pages to your old site so as not to break the Web.

I’ll add local static archive support later.

¹ https://codeberg.org/kitten/app
² https://ar.al/2024/03/08/streaming-html/
³ https://4042307.org

#Kitten #SmallWeb #EvergreenWeb #StreamingHTML #web #dev #NodeJS #JavaScript

🌲 Coming soon to Kitten: one-step evergreen web

One day, you might want a Small Web place at your personal domain. I know I will, at https://ar.al. Problem is, I already have a site there with 20 years of content. And I don’t want all those links to break.

So I’ll simply point a subdomain (e.g., archive.ar.al) to my current server and enter that domain in Kitten’s Settings page.

Learn more: https://4042307.org

#SmallWeb #Kitten #evergreenWeb #web #dev

(Re)introducing 404 → 307 (the evergreen web technique)¹

What if links never died? What if we never broke the Web? What if it didn’t involve any extra work?

It’s possible. And easy.

Just make your 404s into 307s.

https://4042307.org/

¹ Previously, I was doing 404 to 302 but 302 redirects do not keep the request method so 307 is the correct redirect to use. I’d been meaning to update the site for ages and so I finally made some time to do so this week.

#web #dev #evergreenWeb #4042307