fractalnavel

just a note on a few of the more prominent wildflowers seen on a recent hike at the california nature preserve:

•  mayapple. of course, we only saw the foliage at that time
•  these were all over too.
•  dutchman's breeches.  how do you pronounce that last word ?
•  phlox; wasn't that a doctor on enterprise ?
•  violets, of course.

now how hard would it be to have a browser that encounters a “broken” link try to find it at the wayback machine ?  sounds like a good idea for a bho to me, with a toolbar switch to toggle this behavior.  perhaps this would help counter some of the web's advancing senility.  or at least its long term memory problems.  why not pull things from the attic when they've been removed from the front room ?

i wonder how this applies to various government efforts since the wtc incident to purge the web of “sensitive” information ?  do we need an offshore archive ?  a swiss bank account (or cayman) for data ?

maybe this post's title should be “politically incorrect browsers”.

anyway, this just came up because i was remembering the case of my camp dearborn post last summer, and how their web site was in the process of being gutted, leaving me with missing images and dead links (or dead images and missing links).  i went ahead and updated the post, for completeness' sake.

a related issue is information access being changed.  it's missing in a different sense.  what to do with stuff that once was free and now is premium ?  i'm sure some of that is archived as well.  what about stuff that was always premium ?  and what about other blockages and rerouting ? 

somewhat related, i was kind of revisiting that old history thingy of mine.  seems i could use one approach, create a bho that stores my browsing behavior in my own format, in addition to the standard browser history behavior.  in fact, here's one already created - in c#, yet.  too bad it wasn't configurable, i would just use it as is.  now, i could create my own publishing mechanism.  but i was thinking, since the whole point was to share anyway, why not dump it all off to an existing link share system ?  the implicit intent there is that people would be somewhat selective about what links they save, but that's already pretty subjective.  value judgement ?  so for me the selection criteria is not entirely indiscriminate, it would be “whatever links i found worthwhile to follow for any reason”.  of course, i would want to warn the few people aggregating my stuff that i was going to do that.