The Digital Deluge: How to Keep Your Online Writing From Vanishing Forever

Preserving Your Digital Legacy: Archiving and Exhibiting Online Creative Work

The internet is a volatile space. Despite the cliche “the internet is forever,” content can vanish overnight. Whether it’s a publication shutting down, a content management system migrating, or simply an older work being unpublished, your carefully crafted online creations can disappear into the digital ether. This leaves you with a broken link and a feeling of lost effort.

Don’t let your hard work become a digital ghost. This article explores essential tools and strategies for archiving and exhibiting your online creative work, ensuring your digital legacy remains accessible and visible.

Beyond Local Backups

While saving PDFs to a local drive or cloud storage is a good first step, it doesn’t fully address the challenge. PDFs lack the interactive elements and context of the original web content. Additionally, managing a vast archive of PDFs can become cumbersome.

Dedicated Archiving Services:

Fortunately, dedicated archiving services provide a more comprehensive solution. These platforms offer features like:

• Automatic Content Collection: Identifying and saving your work across various platforms.
• Exhibits and Portfolios: Showcase your work to potential fans, employers, or collaborators.

This article focuses on resources for writers and text-based creatives, though dedicated platforms for photographers and visual artists like Flickr and 500px exist. Let’s delve into the options available for preserving your written legacy:

1. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine:

This service, active since 1996, stores snapshots of webpages throughout time. If you published your work online back then, chances are a copy exists in the archive.

However, it’s not perfect. Not all pages are archived, and website owners can request removal of their content.

For proactive archiving:

• Utilize the browser extension: This allows you to directly request archiving for a specific webpage, increasing its chances of survival. However, the extension’s future is uncertain given ongoing updates to browser standards.
• Manually archive: The Internet Archive provides alternative archiving methods, though they are less intuitive.

Cost: Free to use, with optional donations.

2. Authory: Your Writing Backup and Portfolio

Authory is a popular platform among writers for preserving their digital work. It automatically backs up links and text from specified online publications, ensuring your contributions are preserved even if the original source disappears.

Authory’s key features:

• Automated import: Tracks your specified publications and automatically adds new content.
• Portfolio functionality: Presents your work in a professional format, allowing visitors to view your articles directly from the platform if the original source is unavailable.
• Beyond text: Archives videos, podcasts, social media posts, and emails.

Cost:

• Free plan: 10 items maximum, no auto-import.
• Paid plans: Standard plan offers unlimited items, automated import, and other features for $15/month or $144/year. The Professional plan includes extra features like a custom domain and Zapier integration for $24/month or $216/year.
• Free trial: 14 days of Standard or Pro plan.

3. Journo Portfolio: Building a Powerful Portfolio Site

Despite the name, Journo Portfolio caters to creatives beyond journalists, including photographers and videographers. While its primary focus is portfolio creation, it also offers archiving features in its Pro and Unlimited plans.

Key features:

• Beautiful portfolio sites: Customizable templates offer various content blocks for images, quotes, subscriptions, and more.
• Article backups: The Pro and Unlimited plans enable automated backups and screenshot archiving.
• Easy content management: Organize your projects and seamlessly integrate new work.

Cost:

• Free plan: Basic homepage with 10 portfolio items.
• Paid plans: Plus plan offers a five-page site with 50 portfolio items for $8/month or $60/year. The Pro plan unlocks 1,000 portfolio items, article backups, and collaboration features for $12/month or $96/year. The Unlimited plan provides unlimited pages, items, and collaborators for $18/month or $168/year.
• Free trial: Seven-day trial of the Plus plan upon signup.

4. Conifer (Formerly Webrecorder): Preserving Interactivity

Managed by the nonprofit arts organization Rhizome, Conifer offers a different approach to web archiving. Instead of static backups, it creates clickable "sessions" that preserve the interactive elements and links within your online work.

Key features:

• Interactive archives: Allows users to navigate through the archived content and interact with the original website’s features.
• Collection organization: Group your archived content into curated collections for easy navigation.
• Collaboration: Share your collections with others and invite them to collaborate on archiving projects.

Cost:

• Free plan: 5GB of storage.
• Paid plans: Provide more storage with options to add more at a cost.

Conifer is a work in progress. While its free plan offers substantial storage compared to other platforms, it requires a steeper learning curve and lacks automated content collection.

Beyond these platforms, consider:

• Creating your own website: This gives you complete control over how your work is presented, but requires technical knowledge and upkeep.
• Utilizing bookmarking services: Platforms like Pocket Premium or Raindrop Pro can automatically save copies of bookmarked articles.

The Importance of Proactive Archiving:

Don’t wait until your work disappears to start archiving. Begin the process now to safeguard your creative output and ensure its longevity.

Take the following steps:

1. Identify your key works: Determine your most important creations and prioritize their archiving.
2. Choose a platform: Select the archiving service that best aligns with your needs and budget.
3. Set up your account: Configure your chosen platform’s settings to automatically track your work.
4. Regularly review your archive: Ensure your collection is up to date and encompasses your most important work.

By taking proactive steps to archive and exhibit your online creative work, you can ensure your hard work remains accessible and visible to the world, even as the digital landscape continues to evolve. Your digital legacy deserves to be preserved.

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