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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

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Tuesday, 29-Apr-2025 04:50:40 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     PS. It’s also nice when a weekend project actually takes just a weekend – ok, so a weekend + today spent polishing it up. Instead of the month I’ve been working on porting the small-tech.org web site from Site.js to Kitten. That said, it’s not just the port from static site to one with essentially a custom CMS. I’ve also been going through the content, fixing links, etc., as well as fixing issues with Kitten as I encounter them and adding features to Kitten as I go. So every app/site I build using Kitten means Kittens more stable and useful, thereby benefitting every other site/app built with it. :)

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Wednesday, 30-Apr-2025 01:48:43 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     Following on from yesterday, I now have four of our older sites, pointing to archive.org, thanks to Look Over There!

     • https://ind.ie
     • https://better.fyi
     • https://comet.small-web.org
     • https://cleanuptheweb.org

     Our instance of Look Over There! is running at https://look-over-there.small-web.org but you won’t find a sign up link anywhere because this is the Small Web where we *only* have instances of one and, if these instances talk to each other (not relevant for this app), it’s peer to peer.

     Anyway… so you can run your own on a tiny VPS or a single-board computer if you like.

     It’s written in and runs on Kitten so just deploy it¹ with:

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

     If you’d rather just run it locally on your dev machine, do:

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

     To learn more about Kitten and to install it, see:

     https://kitten.small-web.org

     ¹ For more information on deploying Kitten apps, see https://kitten.small-web.org/reference/#deploying-a-kitten-application. Soon, you will be able to deploy Kitten apps via Small Web hosts running Domain (https://codeberg.org/domain/app/) without any technical knowledge required.

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Wednesday, 30-Apr-2025 15:26:06 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Buttered Jorts

     @ajn142 It’s what they’re for and they’re way better funded than we are so I don’t really have a problem with it.

     The cost is in archiving and storing the data, not in the random handful of people stumbling on old links from our sites and seamlessly finding the content that already exists and is stored by the archive.

   • Embed this notice
     Buttered Jorts (ajn142@infosec.exchange)'s status on Wednesday, 30-Apr-2025 15:26:07 JST Buttered Jorts

     in reply to

     @aral how is this not just externalizing your costs on the Internet Archive?

     I do mean that in the nicest way possible, I legitimately want to understand.