Reply to Storify Bites the Dust. If You Have WordPress, You Don’t Need Another Third Party Clown Service

Replied to Storify Bites the Dust. If You Have WordPress, You Don't Need Another Third Party Clown Service by Alan Levine (CogDogBlog)

How many more times do people have to get stiffed by a free web service that just bites the dust and leaves you bubkas? A monster post, some ranting on companies like Storify who offer free services that leverage our effort to get worth enough to get sold – when they do they just yank our content, an approach for local archiving your storify dying content, a new home spun tool for extracting all embeddable content links and how to use it to create your own archives in WordPress. Storify Is Nuking, for no credible reason, All Your Content Okay there are two kinds of people or organizations that create things for the web. One is looking to make money or fame and cares not what happens once they get either (or none and go back to flipping burgers). The other has an understanding and care for the history and future of the web, and makes every effort to make archived content live on, to not leave trails of dead links.

I like Alan Levine’s take on type one and type two silo services. Adobe/Storify definitely seems to be doing things the wrong way for shutting down a service. He does a great job of laying out some thought on how to create collection posts, particularly on WordPress, though I suspect the user interface could easily be recreated on other platforms.

I would add some caution to some of his methods as he suggests using WordPress’s embed capabilities by using raw URLs to services like Twitter. While this can be a reasonable short term solution and the output looks nice, if the original tweet or content at that URL is deleted (or Twitter shuts down and 86s it the same way Storify has just done), then you’re out of luck again!

Better than relying on the auto-embed handled by WordPress, actually copy the entire embed from Twitter to capture the text and content from the original.

There’s a big difference in the following two pieces of data:

and


I hope @storify will follow the example set by @dougkaye when he shut down ITConversations: /> My shows there are now preserved ( in a way that none of my magazine writing was.
— Jon Udell (@judell) December 13, 2017


While WordPress ostensibly displays them the same, one will work as long as Twitter lives, and the other lives as long as your own site lives and actually maintains the original content.

Now there are certainly bigger issues for saving video content this way from places like YouTube given copyright issues as well as bandwidth and other technical concerns. In these cases, perhaps embedding the URLs only within WordPress is the way to go. But keep in mind what it is you’re actually copying/archiving when you use the method he discusses.

Incidentally, I use both Broken Link Checker and Post Archival in the Internet Archive plugins to save a copy of content as well as to help fix broken links on my site when services or sites go down unexpectedly.

Those who are interested in better saving/archiving their content might appreciate the following links/resources:

Indieweb archival copy

Dodging the Memory–Hole Past Conferences and resources at Reynolds Journalism Institute

The Internet Archive

Side note: I prefer the closer Yiddish spelling of bupkis. It is however a great term for what you often end up receiving from social silos that provide you with services that you can usually pretty easily maintain yourself.