Wget is definitely a good start. What's needed is a shiny and usable UI, ways to catalog / tag / search inside your saved data, and a painless installation process. This could use come work.
I don't get the number of free/paid mummifications? Seems very low, space or bandwidth are abundant.
I think, and with respect to original developer, this is more a feature then an app and probably would help if it would be developed further to target more specific problem/group.
The OP depends upon Javascript for any and all content delivery/rendition. Given the topic at hand, I find this more than a bit ironic.
I gather from the comments that this is some sort of online storage of a copy. That may serve some use cases over the short term.
If you really want to avoid loss or "link rot", maintain your own copy on your own equipment.
I've been around to observe everything from personal interest changes, death, corporate policy changes, ownership transfers, deliberate manipulation... etc. -- you get the idea -- effect the ability to pull even what were formerly considered very stable and long-standing, aka "permanent", resources.
If you want to ensure you have access, save your own copy onto hardware that you own. End of story.
50 mummies per month for the highest plan is way way way too low. It should 10,000 or even 50,000. Think about it this way: the people who are willing to pay you for this type of service are probably huge publishers who would use this service to share their URLs to their followers in Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Doesn't help them much if a huge publisher is paying them $15 a month. That type of sale would require a SLA too, they really just need a contact email address.
Would it be a better option if the "permanents" were shared across p2p/bittorrent and every unique item had at least 10 shares distributed across the globe, maybe a max of 20. When one share host goes down, it just picks up a replacement.
The whole point of a service like this is long-term access and that really requires a data checkout option which can be used with other tools (e.g. https://github.com/alard/warc-proxy).
But I wonder...isn't it safe to assume that, eventually, browser rendering engines* will change to the degree that something I saved 4+ years ago is essentially unreadable?
And doesn't that same potential problem apply to a hosted service as well?
*I'm using that vague term to describe everything I don't understand about how browsers render pages, markup, and javascript, which is a lot.
I agree. I think the safest bet would be to keep a static image as well. Without a static image would will always question if the rendering engine has even slightly changed the look.
I save screenshots for that, but when I save an archive it's usually b/c I'm interested in referencing non-static elements. Like animation, transition, responsive behavior, etc.
But to trust that something like this to make a permanent copy of stuff I'm linking to, I'd need to know a bit more about them. Else this is effectively like using a link shortener -- a single point of failure.
Hey creator here, we realize there is a bit of a trust issue, thats why we have the paid plans. Our costs are low enough that, even if you were our only paying customer left we would be able to keep the service running just for you.
I have been using the Scrapbook add-on (see screenshots and manual here : [1]) in Firefox [2] for many years for this; it saves the web page to your local hard disk, and there are several types of annotations that you can perform on the saved page. One trick I use is to first run Readability on the page to get a clean version, and then save that to Scrapbook. With full-text and comments-only-search, this add-on, all by itself, kept me with Firefox even during the dark period when Chrome came in and thrashed Firefox on performance :-)
I used to use diigo.com, which does the job quite well, too, before I discovered Scrapbook.
I use evernote premium ($45/year) which is much cheaper and includes a tonne of extra features.
Compare this to the pricing plan of mummify at $15/month pricing or $180/year. for that price I could buy a pair of HD with several terabytes of capacity and copy/paste the whole webpage, code, files and all using httrack.
If it's something personal, I use http://archive.is with their bookmarklet in Chrome (free; unlimited archiving). It immediately renders the page, saves a copy with a unique url, and gives me a .zip link to download the archive.
If it's something I want to submit to the Internet Archive, I use wget with WARC extensions (http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Wget_with_WARC_ou...), submit the archive to the IA and notify them it needs to be merged in, and keep the .tar.gz archive.
Eventually I'll webapp/one-click the whole thing, with an archive to S3 and/or Glacier.
Most of the time, one will not know which pages one links to will disappear in the future. This service therefore only seems really useful if you use it with every link you make. That would make the biggest plan short on "mummies" by a couple of orders of magnitude, at least.
> Not every page one visits is worth storing. The whole point is to filter out (and save) the good from the rest.
If this is a tool to "fight link rot", then we're not talking about every page one visits, we're talking about every page one links to. Presumably, every page worth linking to is also worth saving.
Really like this, nice work. Is there a way to automatically mummify every link on an entire website or directory? Your method/service could be an interesting, easy to use way to recall a read-only version of a site after it goes down.
Do you rip video on the page too? If so, I would definitely use this service. I've got videos with my company brand a bit everywhere and I can't find a good way to download it or link to it so that it stay there permanently.
Just a thought: the "Link Rot" link should really be a Mummified link. I know Wikipedia isn't disappearing any time soon, but it just seemed silly to me not to "realise" the use case!
This is pretty cool, I'd be happy with a service that mummified it to storage I control, since I've had pages that I've pointed to at archive.org vanish after the current robots.txt was changed.
The examples of the page don't work. Would be nice that they have some working examples right at hand to see how the redirecting or the mirroring work on each case.
Rant: I absolutely hate when someone posts an answer in Stack Overflow and it points to their blog, which then stops working at some point. What if Wikipedia was just a collection of links to blogs or other datasources (citations aside). Put your damn answers in Stack Overflow people!
This is an example of how great branding can help explain a product. Love the name, love the look, the copy is clever... but I don't like the low number of mummifications you get per plan.
I suggest adding more value or lowering the monthly price.
Sorry you are having trouble with it. Sometimes the caches take a bit to generate. Please feel free to shoot us an email at help@mummify.it if your problem persists.
FYI, for those of us with Firefox's NoScript extension your site is completely broken. Nothing loads, it is just a blank page with a list of scripts you intend to run.
I wasn't curious enough about your service to whitelist your site, but I will leave a comment asking that you consider providing alternate content.
It is rare to have a site completely fail to load, even with all scripts blocked (though I accept I will have reduced functionality).
You're running an extension that purposely disables what makes the majority of the web work. Unless you disable it, you can't really complain about sites not working correctly for you.
HTML is what makes the majority of the web work, with additional functionality (optionally) provided by scripts. When I see a blank page I wouldn't call that 'not working correctly' I would call it 'not working at all'.
Maybe we agree to disagree now, and you go on blindly trusting all websites to execute random code on your machine. I am perfectly content to have new websites look a little funny the first time I visit.
"HTML is what makes the majority of the web work" - Yes, ten years ago.
The modern internet is javascript. The code is executing in a secure sandbox. If you can get it to do something random on your machine make sure to let Google know, they'll send you a pretty big check.
It's not just doing something funny with the machines, it's also doing funny stuff with other websites. Plenty of websites are still vulnerable to XSS and CSRF.
Having used noscript for a while, I've gotten into the habit of letting it block everything at first and only allowing what seems necessary for that site.
I'm perfectly okay with the 'broken until enabled' model... I used to use "Request Policy" in Firefox - the most granular control of script and XSS accesses I've ever seen. Miss it in Chrome.
This is a red herring. The overwhelming majority of screen readers support javascript front ends. As in, over 98% of people who use screenreaders use one that supports javascript.
They use the Web ARChive format (WARC http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/WARC ) which I hope mummify and other such services will standardize on.