Just noticed an issue with Look Over There!¹ where some of the sites I was forwarding to archive.org began to fail.

I’ve now documented the proper way to redirect to archive.org in Look Over There! and I also wrote a brief post on the relevant Reddit to alert the folks at The Internet Archive about this and suggest an improvement that could benefit findability on sites with redirects in general:

https://www.reddit.com/r/theinternetarchive/comments/1ksndno/sites_that_redirect_to_archived_versions_of/

¹ e.g., See our instance for Small Technology Foundation at https://look-over-there.small-web.org

CC @textfiles @brewsterkahle

#TheInternetArchive #LookOverThere #SmallWeb #SmallTech #web #archiving

You can really get a feel for what authoring a simple web app is like in Kitten (with the latest techniques/features), by checking out the source code for Look Over There!, the multi-site forwarding app with TLS forwarding support that I built recently:

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

There’s an instance of it I’m hosting for us at https://look-over-there.small-web.org to forward our archived sites – e.g., https://web0.small-web.org – to archive.org so we don’t break links on the web.

If you want to run it locally, install Kitten (https://kitten.small-web.org) and then type: kitten run https://codeberg.org/small-web/look-over-there.git (you can also clone the git repo manually and just run kitten from the working directory).

Interesting places to look:

• The index page (shows use of a Markdown page that imports and uses Kitten components) https://codeberg.org/small-web/look-over-there/raw/branch/main/index.page.md

• The admin page (notice the lock emoji at the end of the name? That’s all you need to add to a route to make use of Kitten’s automatic authentication. Since every Kitten site/app is protected by public-key encryption and we don’t have the concept of users (each site/app on the Small Web is owned by one person), the whole process can be automated for you. https://codeberg.org/small-web/look-over-there/src/branch/main/admin%F0%9F%94%92.page.js

• The Redirection component. This is what does all the hard work on the admin page. Along with the admin page, they showcase Kitten’s new/alternative (and as-of-yet mostly undocumented) class-based component model with event bubbling on the component hierarchy on the server. (Since this is resource intensive, it’s recommended you use it only when implementing authenticated routes where you’re sure only the site’s owner will be accessing the route.) https://codeberg.org/small-web/look-over-there/src/branch/main/Redirection.component.js

In any case, as Kitten and the rest of the Small Web ecosystem matures further, I’ll be documenting all this better and there will be even more examples and tutorials but, in case you’re one of those inquisitive types and you want to see what web development can be like if you’re *not* building centralised people farming machinery for Big Tech, have a play with Kitten.

💕

#Kitten #SmallWeb #SmallTech #SmallTechnologyFoundation #LookOverThere #code #web #dev

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

France, France, France. You guillotined your royals and then decided to never do anything worthwhile ever again. That's class. Take a bow and a kilo of coke out of petty cash, you've earned it.

#OnlyKidding #ILoveFrance #EspeciallyTheCheese #PlusYourNaziCollaboratorsMostlyWereIneffective #WhoopsIDidntMeanToBringUpYourNaziCollaborators #LetsPretendIDidntSayAnything #LikeYouDoWheneverAnyoneMentionsThatWeirdGapBetweenTheThirdAndFourthRepublics #LookOverThere #ItsJerryLewis #IWasntTryingToDistractYou #HowCouldYouEvenSuggestThat #Pétain #FreudianSlip #DAccordJeRegretteQuelquesChoses