

Show HN: A Url Permanence Service - dRocking
http://purl.ly/

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shardling
Is having a Libya based domain name really the best way to ensure permanent
URL structure?

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tingletech
You could use <http://purl.org> which has been around since the 90s.

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buro9
How do you resolve offering a permanent URL for something whilst also
complying with DMCA takedowns for copyright materials when the end service may
have removed the content but you continue to publish it?

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wut42
There is already <http://purl.org>

See
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_Uniform_Resource_Loc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_Uniform_Resource_Locator)
also, this is a "protocol"

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secure
Sounds cool, but only as long as purl.ly itself is up. We’ve seen what happens
with single point of failure services like this when twitter’s link shortener
t.co was down.

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Tylui
Actually, if you notice, the purl.ly link has the original link after it. Even
if purl.ly goes down, there's at least SOME reference to be tracked down.
Relatively graceful, especially when compared to a WebCite link:
<http://www.webcitation.org/5IfzstWm1>

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antirez
This is a good idea in theory, but not if in form of a company. This would
require something like a consortium where Google, Microsoft, Twitter,
Facebook, ... and a few more federates to create a service paying for the bill
and with the intention to take it up for the future as long as possible.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Plus there's already a service that does the same thing, is free, and is
heavily relied upon, WebCite.

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anonymouz
There's also the DOI system that mostly solves this problem for more permanent
material ( research articles).

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oh_sigh
Infinite loops: <http://purl.ly/tinyurl.com/qui3na>

purly -> tinyurl -> baconized purly

~~~
diminish
and here a 'not found' message, though created.
<http://purl.ly/news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg>

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detectify
Tried the service and got two errors first,

I cannot add a URL that does not have "http" I cannot type a URL that has
"https"

Would be nice to be able to add https adresses and add them in any form.

Also an idea, make it as a web browser plugin so I can change the url in the
brower and add it to my link library. Then it's even better. I don't like
detours.

Question, what happen if I prul.ly a Url once then the content changes and I
want to save the new content as well (Different content, same url)?

Anyway, I really like the concept, keep going!

Annelie @detectify

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Foomandoonian
Interesting choice to use a Libyan domain for a service like this.

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chinmoy
How is using a Libyan domain interesting here? Bit.ly is doing it.

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Foomandoonian
Who? Bitly.com?

Perhaps Libya is as reliable as anywhere else in the world - it's all a matter
of perspective. Ask The Pirate Bay guys how confident they would be using a
.com. Still, the idea of putting a service that offers 'permanence' on a
domain so far out of reach seems like a bad idea to me.

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dRocking
The nameservers themselves are here in the us, which will hopefully help. But
you have a good point.

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benologist
I don't like the redirect page, it's a large and heavy page with a forced
delay and what looks like placeholders for a ton of ads.

It might be better packaged as something blogs and forums can automagically
implement for a fee instead of trying to make money off ads.

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vampirical
I did something similar as a weekend project, haven't checked-up on it in a
while but it seems to still work:
[http://const.it/http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240529...](http://const.it/http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204349404578101393870218834.html)

The original idea was just to provide a consistent link which would fallback
to a cache when necessary and back to the original content for reddit/hn type
traffic. Then it made sense to do some paywall busting and readability
functionality on top of it and those features overshadowed the original
concerns.

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dRocking
Thanks for all of the feedback everyone... it has been very exciting to
actually "launch" something and get some feedback. You guys did a swell job of
uncovering some bugs and edge cases. I'm going to keep pushing and at least
get it working as advertised.

I did some research ahead of time and did come across purl.org, but had no
idea about WebCite and a couple of the others. Yes, my project is basically
the same as those.

Does this work as a single point of failure company? Who knows, but it's been
fun.

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tingletech
If you have an interested in permanent identifiers, you might also be
interested the archival resource key standard
<https://wiki.ucop.edu/display/Curation/ARK> and the EZID service
<http://n2t.net/ezid/> . Disclaimer, I work at the same digital library where
the standard and the service are developed and maintained.

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dRocking
It's pretty quick and dirty... purl.ly links will detect a 404 at the
destination and redirect you to the google cache instead. Works great if that
page is in the google cache, but it may not be.

I'll get around to caching the full content of the destinations at time of
purl.ly creation next, and serve that if google is missing it.

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Hello71
So it's basically WebCite.

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arb99
seems that some urls with a query string give an error

eg make a purl for
[http://www.reddit.com/top/?sort=top&t=hour](http://www.reddit.com/top/?sort=top&t=hour)
which generates
[http://purl.ly/www.reddit.com/top/?sort=top&t=hour](http://purl.ly/www.reddit.com/top/?sort=top&t=hour)
which gives a 404

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TazeTSchnitzel
Looks like not many people are actually using it:

<http://purl.ly/purl/index>

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dRocking
It launched with this Show HN...

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TazeTSchnitzel
Fair enough, I'm just surprised there's so few links. Looks like most people
that have seen it haven't even tried it...

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level09
looks similar to what archive.org is doing, except that the later saves
complete websites recursively ..

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NanoWar
Seems that cats are involved?

