Screenshot of the authenticated /admin route on Look Over There!, running at look-over-there.small-web.org. There are instructions for setting up DNS to point to the IP address on the server for the domains you want to forward and a list of Active redirections (there’s just one for now, for cleanuptheweb.org, which forwards to a URL on archive.org. There’s also an add redirection form with a from field for the domain an arrow and a to field for the URL to forward to, followed by an Add button. For entries in the Active redirections section, the Add button is replaced with a Remove button. There’s also a Made with Kitten button with a minimalist grey kitten face logo with pink ears. Intructions, full text: Create a DNS A record pointing to 157.90.155.45 for the domain you want to redirect. Wait for your DNS changes to propagate (ping the domain to check). Add your redirection using the form below. Due to Let’s Encrypt rate limits, you may add 97 more redirections (maximum 10 every 3 hours). Funding link in footer, full text: Like this? Fund us! Small Technology Foundation is a tiny, independent not-for-profit. We exist in part thanks to patronage by people like you. If you share our vision and want to support our work, please become a patron or donate to us today and help us continue to exist.

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   Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Tuesday, 29-Apr-2025 04:46:01 JST Aral Balkan

   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!

   :kitten:💕

   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