As I get older, I've decided to write physical books. I want something of a legacy for after I leave.<p>In the back of the book, I'd like to put a 2D barcode to send folks to a static webpage somewhere, maybe for further information, an update, text changes, etc.<p>But where would that go? If I buy a domain I've got to renew it every year. Same goes for AWS static page hosting. I thought about using my GitHub account, but each year they keep screwing around with keys and logins and whatnot. I'm sure that most all of these places I'm using will delete both my account and data after a certain number of years of inactivity.<p>So where do I put a static webpage I can link to and be assured (mostly) that it'll be around 100 years or more from now?
Just put it on your own domain and keep it there while you're alive. Renewing it is not that hard, especially with auto-renew on a credit card.<p>And make sure the Internet Archive indexes it. When people find old links that don't resolve anymore, IA is where they go.<p>Don't overthink this. Nothing lasts forever, but right now I'd say IA is the most likely repository to survive over the longest term, certainly in comparison to any for-profit company.
100 years is too long. Maybe not because the company or institution where you will host it directly or indirectly will vanish (the Lindy effect matters choosing one), but because we, as internet and its users, moved on. The changes are accelerating, in the last very few years AIs are being used as search engines and providing content, new generations doesn't read so much (as they consume things like Instagram or TikTok), and that is a relatively recent development.<p>You may still find user pages on universities that goes back to the early 90's, before that simply there was no web, and that was just 30 years back, 10 years earlier was the start of TCP/IP, mail and DNS protocols. But 20 years later from now things may be very different to what we know so far.<p>Maybe it would be for the better to ride the waves, and instead of doing things like we did till a few years back, rely on AIs or other systems that will hold that knowledge somewhat and that can be interacted with. And hope that where you put the today's style static web page with your book addendum gets indexed by them and used when the consumer of the content you created request it somehow.
Ultimately you have to give a human direct responsibility for it; or in your case, a series of humans.<p>I'd suggest you do buy a domain, but set up a legal/financial framework so that a long-standing law firm will keep up the payments for N decades (or for as long as the firm & its successors exist).
Your problem isnt so much "content storage" as it is "addressing". For example, you could carve the info into a rock, and instruct an immediate descendent to maintain it, and have them tell their children, etc. Or create a religion that maintains The Rock.<p>But lets imagine you found a crystalline web server that ran off sun light and was backed by rock storage. Who is to be assured that the https scheme will still exist in 100 years? Or that DNS is still the resolution method? FTP had a 20 year run before dying. Gopher lasted under a decade. Http is dying out under the weight of security and corporatization. Even DNS is under pressure to be centralized and otherwise fiddled with in the name of convenience (eg locality). So your descendents might not be able to resolve your URN locator scheme, or have a usable client to reach it, no matter how good your long term storage is.
100 years is too long time. Modern science don't know, how to make something, which will exist so long. This is because, even when we could make machine which will work so long, nobody could guarantee existence of jurisdiction where machine will be. And to move machine to other place will need some people, but people active lifetime is much less.<p>For this problem, even Darpa created special research program and at the moment only exists one serious applicant - <a href="https://100yss.org/" rel="nofollow">https://100yss.org/</a><p>You could try to ask some of Japanese oldest organizations to host your page, as they have few entities existing hundreds years. But you should ask not one but few, I think at least 3, because just few years ago bankrupted 700-years old Japanese bank.<p>Other possible candidates - some churches and property communes in Western countries. But also, each additional host will just make higher probability but will not guarantee anything.<p>Also possible to ask your family to save your site, but even if your family is reliable enough, who knows, how will look like society in 100 years, and if your book/site will be legal.<p>I think, if you will place something on Moon, exists high probability nobody will reach it in 100 years (I think, large share territory of Moon will be desert like now), so it will save. And yes, it is possible to make laser communication system, so somebody could buy components for some reasonable cost and make call and receive data from your site there.
If you are willing to relinquish copyright claims on your work, for example by including a copyleft statement in the book’s preface, an organization like Project Gutenberg may be willing to host it, ostensibly in perpetuity. Other considerations are whether the book can stand alone as text-only, or will it rely on additional media to convey its message to the reader?<p>More about Project Gutenberg: <a href="http://gutenberg.org" rel="nofollow">http://gutenberg.org</a>
Nothing lasts forever. Even 100 years is a very long time given the technology / cultural / legal changes. It's futile to try to come up with an eternal solution. Just host it on something that seems to be reliable / stable for the foreseeable future and tell the younger generation to migrate it after you are gone to whatever tech of their day is going to be. If the younger generation does not care to migrate your work, then it is not of value to their generation and it is OK for it to fizzle out. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but it is probably best to have realistic expectations about how much people would care about your work after you are gone.
Travel to a secluded part oft he world with plenty of sunshine. Bury a time capsule containing a Rasberry pi with a long antenna and solar panel sticking out of the ground behind a big pile of shrubbery.
Just a suggestion, and I suspect I might have overlooked some drawbacks: what about hosting it on SEVERAL of those websites/platforms/services/communication systems (probably with a version "number" or a last updated date), and inside the book, provide several backup links, in case the first one was dead by the time they visited it?<p>Basically spreading the risk to maybe 10 platforms instead of 1, hoping that at least 1 always survives.<p>One issue would be that if you lose the login access to one of those platforms, their content might be deprecated on that page, and more recent content would be displayed on others. But that might be a small enough problem to ignore it.
You could also encourage readers to visit 2-3 of the links, instead of 1, to increase the chances they read the one with the most recently updated content.<p>And/or maybe each of those pages could embed a system that "fetches" the status of the other 9 pages, and display the version number of the content of each of them, so that the reader can navigate to other pages if they see that another one has more recently updated content.<p>And/or you (the author) could manually have to go on the 10 pages every month/year and "confirm" that the content is still up-to-date. Each page would display: "the author has last confirmed the validity of this page on date X".
This stops working after you pass away, though, but since all pages would show the same last confirmed date, that might be ok.
You could also add a warning on those platforms: "If you see that I haven't confirmed the validity of the content in more than X months, I have either lost access to this page or passed away. Please check some of the other links from the book to see if their "last confirmed by author date" is the same, and if so, please try and check online whether I have passed away".<p>In any case, a fun problem to think about, thank you!
Putting it on Arweave is the best I can think of. And then link to the content on arweave.net:<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=site:arweave.net+book" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=site:arweave.net+book</a><p>As Arweave is designed for this exact use case. Even if arweave.net disappears, one can still find the content one the Arweave blockchain via the hash. The chain is built in a way that it creates a very high incentive for people around the world to keep hosting the content.
You gotta go "store and forward" to have a chance.<p>- Make your static data small.<p>- Pick a version scheme and use it.<p>- Gather your static data into a release, including an indicator of the version, and sign it.<p>- Also gather your static data into a form easily transmittable by others. If your static data will fit into a few pages of PDFs, it can be read by just about anything with a CPU that real people touch, and can also be printable. There are many tools that create PDFs that aren't Adobe.<p>- HTML archives, such as those that SingleFile make, are better than PDFs but less accessible (e.g. not viewable on phones, require extension to be installed).<p>- License the content in a way that encourages sharing.<p>- Make sure the content itself encourages sharing. Good, unique artwork tends to do this, in addition to the data itself being interesting or important. Comics from the 1940s made it to the Internet age and they'll probably make the post-Internet age too.<p>- Discord, Telegram, and Github would be an example of three places that would understand the concept of "here's a PDF of a site, here for archival purposes, feel free to share this to anyone or print it."
Very simple. Turn the webpage into a static blob url, and the 2d barcode will launch that blob url.<p>Since it’s a static blob, you don’t need to host it at all. The url itself is the code for the webpage
Anywhere + get the Internet Archive to index it?<p>IPFS could be a contender, though I don't know where it stands now, but it's the ambition, at least.
I'll offer a weird but (I hope) valid alternative to the other great suggestions here:<p>print the code of the static webpage on a piece of paper. Even better, archival paper [0], so it will really last a long time.<p>In the future, anyone would be able to point a... smartphone, or a camera, to the paper, and instantly retrieve the webpage. An AI will ask them if they want to render the page using one of these very, very old things called browsers.<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid-free_paper" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid-free_paper</a>
This is actually pretty hard to do. We all have heard of internet rot/dead internet theory.<p>One shout might be to link to internet archive instead of the resource directly. Though we can't be sure internet archive will keep the current system working as is (e.g. search params may change etc)<p>The only solid solution I have is to set up a foundation and pour money in so that they will be responsible for upkeep. But that would be an hassle to execute.<p>100 years in internet time is very long, internet as we know it now hasn't been along for 100 years.<p>I wonder if there aren't services that specialize in this.
I read there suggestion to carve in stone, and on second view it don't look bad idea.<p>But I suggest not just one stone, but build many hills on large piece of land and place them to form giant QR code, for example 1px=1m (resolution is not random, but it is typical for modern Earth imaging satellites, and for other Earth imaging technologies).<p>I think, in 100 years, most probably, will exist technology to make photo (or drawing) from height and then translate it into bits and decode text.<p>And to find it, I think will be enough to place in book geocoordinates and even most probably, Earth will be still round and even if GPS will not exist, somebody will know, how to convert GPS coordinates to what will exist.<p>With some luck, possible that these giant pictures will notice few big information entities and place in their archives, so history will save them.<p>Sure, here quality have not less importance than quantity, even so powerful entity as Life could disappear, so need to somehow attract attention of few, not only one.
You may try "<a href="https://www.tinymind.me" rel="nofollow">https://www.tinymind.me</a>". (Declaration: This is something I made, but it is a non-profit product).<p>It allows you to write public blogs/ideas and is hosted on Github. Users can view it without logging in. In theory, if Github doesn't close down, your content will exist permanently.
I’m not sure I would bet on the web itself still existing in 100 years. That being said, I think the biggest risk here is your hosting company going out of business, or changing their products such that they won’t host your site anymore.<p>If you’re OK with your website having a big ugly URL (which might not be a problem if you use a QR code to point to it anyway) then hosting a static website on AWS S3 might be your best bet. There’s so much money flowing into AWS right now, I imagine there will be enough interest to keep it going for several decades to come.<p>EDITED TO ADD As far as i know you can prepay your AWS bills, so you could prepay a massive amount and hope it outruns future price inflation
I doubt that people will know what to do with the "2D barcode" in 100 years. Someone who is willing to investigate will figure it out. But it is not something that will be convenient.<p>I for example wouldn't know what to do with a barcode even today.
The most sensible thing to do here is found a religion and have your adherents ascribe a sacred quality to your writings and they'll then preserve it over millennia regardless of the format changes / translations required.
I wonder how much data you could store if you turned the last ten pages into very dense QR codes that together formed a compressed tar?<p>The ink degradation might be a concern. And it would require some expertise to reassemble.
Websites are roughly similar to real estate. They have an irreducible amount of paid maintenance required. Domain names are subject to renewal fees, like property tax. Hosting isn’t free, and it’s subject to a bewildering, ever-evolving variety of attacks. Hosting itself costs money. The only hope is to pay for a trust to handle all of this.<p>Or just assume that if your writing is as valuable as you think it is, others will recognize its worth and keep it alive.
Spam your articles into any website that allows commenting, like forums, blogs, news sites, porn sites, etc. Start the text with a unique string that when searched throws no results currently, followed by date and time. Store the unique string in your barcode. When people search for that string in 100y they'll find any of the surviving texts, the date and time will let them know which is the order.
Think knowledge as carried by the human brain. What you are asking is few generations ahead to remember the knowledge your brain created. The best way is to transmit it from brain to brain. Codify your knowledge into some kind of poetry stanzas. this would ensure effective compression and repeatability. Teach the poems to a few in the next generation. Create a loop to ensure that knowledge is passed verbatim. After a few centuries you will see it will survive. This how it is done traditionally
I'm pretty sure if you put a file on s3, make it public, it will be accessible for quite a while, with no cost (if it's just text like you're describing). I have an aws account that has the html/js stored in s3 for a static website i created, I haven't paid a bill in years on it, and the site is still running today.<p>I don't expect it to last 100 years though, they may very well change their free policies a year from now, hell, i don't know if AWS or even Amazon will be around 100 years from now.
My strategy would be to go for redundancy:<p>The physical book can contain a QR Code, Barcode, printed URL and so on, that’s correct at the time of print.<p>But then leave hints on how to search and find the book online if those resources are not available.<p>Such as a promise to list the book with your Author name, book title, ISBN and so on.<p>Then replicate the content across the internet, and try to cross link to all the resources.<p>The only thing you can really trust is your own domain name, so that has to be the base right now.
I had a similar thought and wrote about evergreen blogs recently: <a href="https://rishikeshs.com/journal/evergreen-blogs/" rel="nofollow">https://rishikeshs.com/journal/evergreen-blogs/</a><p>Derek Sivers is planning something similar with Digital Legacy Trust: <a href="https://legacytrust.nz/" rel="nofollow">https://legacytrust.nz/</a>
> <i>and be assured (mostly) that it'll be around 100 years or more from now?</i><p>You print it and add it to your book (not sure if any ink will do, though)
I don't know, but I've put this question in my favourites list!<p>I do mantain a stripped-down ZIP of one of my key sites in Zenodo:<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10119195" rel="nofollow">https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10119195</a><p>But maybe you could just host a plain-text or similar file there or at Dryad and hand out the DOI / URL?
Put it on Blogger from Google. Has been around since 1999. There are some huge blogs/websites hosted on Blogger.<p>They make money with Adsense, and it turn Google does to.<p>Google has killed a lot of products but in my opinion they will keep this. There are just so many blogs, little and small, some who have posts dating from '99 even, still online.
Forever is a really long time, but I think a public GitHub repository should be reasonably durable. You can easily host sites on GitHub and Microsoft has a vested interest in keeping repositories around.
We have good records of books and music sheets from hundreds of years ago. Think Shakespeare and Mozart. Talk to your librarian. If your pages are worth keeping, I think that's your best bet.
A perpetual trust is a legal instrument that is designed to ensure an asset is passed down generations and dispersed in a particular, pre-determined way. Hire a lawyer to help put some non-coastal real estate and some inert metals and some extremely safe index funds and bonds in that and have it rebalance and reinvest every so often and periodically draw off enough from the accumulating interest to pay for whatever a domain and static hosting costs, into the future, plus maybe a little to cover translating a text file into whatever the hell our AI overlords are serving after they’re done with all the genociding.