Why you must print out every page of your web site

Tuesday, 17 February 2009 |

Your company web site has no-doubt had several loving hours spent on it. If you have a blog, it's pretty certain that there will be tens of thousands of words in it by now if you have been blogging for a a year. This web site, for instance, has over half a million words of editorial in it - that's around ten books worth; quite a lot of work. How many words does your web site have? Indeed, have you even considered the intellectual capital you have embedded in your site?

Now what if, by the click of a switch, someone, somewhere decided that they will change the way the software that produced your site works. What if the way that sites are stored was changed? What if a key company went bust in the chain that gets your website out to the world at large? Could you resurrect your site - would your intellectual capital be lost forever?

OK - I know - you've heard of backups before and I'm sure you have them. But, Dr Vint Cerf - the person who invented the coding that makes the entire internet work - has said at this week's Search Marketing Expo that we must all consider the problem of "bit rot" - the fading away of parts of the internet because they were constructed with old software that is no longer available.

This is a problem that has been taxing the National Archives for many years. They are charged with storing everything they possibly can to preserve an archive of the country. Since so much of that is now online - what if the archive could not be accessed at some stage in the future?

As Dr Cerf said: "Imagine it's the year 3000 and you've just done a Google search and you turn up a 1997 PowerPoint file, and you're running Windows 3000. The question is, does it know how to interpret the PowerPoint file? The answer is probably no."

But you don't have to think that far into the future. I have book manuscripts in a program called MacAuthor; it was all the rage at the time - in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Douglas Adams even wrote The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy on it. We used to speak at conferences together about the use of such "desktop publishing" software in business. But sadly the original manuscript of that book - and the original manuscripts of my books are no longer accessible. To edit such books, they now need to be scanned in again from the paper records because MacAuthor no longer exists and nothing will import the files any more.

Save ink and paper

You can save ink and paper by using FinePrint to print out your pages. This lets you print on both side of the paper automatically, plus put two pages per side, reduce the amount of ink you use and a host of other features which will significantly reduce the amount of paper and ink you use. I've used FinePrint for the past couple of years and my ink and paper bills have been slashed - ink down by 72% and paper down by 55%. And I print MORE now than I did two years ago. Try FinePrint for yourself.

So even though Dr Cerf is pointing out a potential problem for the internet long-term, not having a copy of your work which can be accessed in more traditional ways could be a real problem for you.

And as Dr Cerf pointed out in his speech, paper will be accessible for many, many, many years to come. After all you can still look at the real, 1000-year-old Domesday Book - as well as access the online version nowadays. But if, in a few years time, that online version failed to work because of some change in software along the line - we'd still be able to access the paper version.

So, consider your web site and your current online resources. What if Facebook decided you had to upload all your profile material, rather than typing it into an online form? They could do just that now if they wanted, nothing is really stopping them (apart from ease of use). But what if they did? Do you have all your Facebook profile information in a file you can upload? Or would you have to start from scratch again? Even if it was on paper, you could scan it in and then upload it.

It may not be very "green" to keep a copy of your web site in paper form; but it would preserve your work, not only for yourself if something went wrong, but for future generations who may not be able to get into your digital work otherwise.

6 Comments

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LouiseBJ makes this comment

Tuesday 17 February, 2009

Oh dear Graham, this makes for very sobering reading! I suppose with the internet being relatively 'young' in years, there are bound to be many obstacles to overcome that haven't even been thought of yet!
Internet Consultants makes this comment

Tuesday 17 February, 2009

Whilst this is a reasonable thing to do for a small website; it's impractical for large websites, particularly if they are dynamic and as such could contain several 1000 pages that may change on a regular basis. So long as the web site is produced from HTML and it's database (if it has one) is in a relational format, it's pretty much future proof as far as editing is concerned as such technologies are backwards compatible editable. For example, I can edit a website built 10 years ago using today's knowledge of HTML, however I can't open a Windows 3.1 document using Windows Vista. Problems could arise if websites are built from proprietary software technologies and later versions may not be backwards compatible. This is certainly the case with desktop software as you mention in your post. The best option is ask your site's developer to supply a back-up of the site files and it's database (if it has one) to you on some sort of media such as a CD. If your web designer or hosting company does go bust, then any web developer worth his salt will be able to rescue your site from the back-up.
Graham makes this comment

Tuesday 17 February, 2009

Thanks for the comment, Internet Consultants. I agree, that large web sites would find a paper version nigh-on impossible. And yes, if a site is in HTML and in a relational database it should be pretty straightforward in 10 years time to deal with it, if things go wrong. But who is to say that HTML will be here in 10, 100, or 1000 years time? The chances are it might not last for centuries. Technology is always being re-invented and superseded. As Dr Cerf says, we really need to think about how we can be sure future generations can access our material. I'm pretty confident than in 1,000 years from now, people (if they really wanted to) could access my books since they are in libraries, including The British Library. But I'm not so sure they'd be able to access all of my content on the internet (should they ever want to). That's the issue which needs grappling with - though it seems that software companies and Governments alike are all leaving it to "somebody else" to sort out...!
Ayd makes this comment

Tuesday 17 February, 2009

I feel the main point here is, as always, to keep multiple backups of your data in multiple places in multiple formats. I believe what Graham is saying (which he is always quite rightly saying) is that people tend to become besotted and doey-eyed about the 'magic' of the internet and technology creating a false sense of security about its magical powers. Many brands of CDRs bought over five years ago may well be 'bronzing' - the foil coating oxidising destroying all data. Hard drives get damaged heads or de-magnetised sectors. Silicone chips suffer from bit-rot. Printing important documents may help with small amounts of text but not with video and audio content. The only answer I've found is to think of your data as being alive, like a plant. We need to look after it, replenish it, refresh it, take multiple cuttings from it, transfer it to a larger pot. And realise that, just like a plant, if we ignore it, it will wither and die.
Internet Consultants makes this comment

Tuesday 17 February, 2009

Excellent conversation thread and some good points made. The other thing to think of is that a lot of the "virtual information" that exists these days, proably wouldn't exist in the first place at all if traditional media (paper etc) was to be relied upon. All data across all formats has a finite life. Photography as a social record is one that will suffer I feel as since digital, photographs have become very much a throw away commodity, unlike film and printed photos which tend to be valued and kept.
Peter Abrahams makes this comment

Saturday 21 February, 2009

Graham It is definitely worth making people aware of this issue but the industry has been thinking about it for some considerable time. PDF/A is an attempt to create a form of PDF that is for archiving. Microsoft Open Office XML (OOXML) was really first created to enable the long term storage of documents. XML and HTML are both formats that will allow future generations to read them; it only needs a document explains what the coding means. Audio and video is a little more complex but standard formats should be readable even if the original programs to read them are no longer available. All of this assumes that future generations will be able to read the bits on the media and interpret them as bytes. There seems no reason to believe that these capabilities will be lost. Libraries should be just of capable of preserving binary recordings as they are capable of preserving paper; in fact more so as there is less of a space constraint. My understanding is the archivists in the major libraries have this well in hand. I think that printing anything of a web site is a waste of time and a distraction to solving the real problem of how to preserve it digitally.