Internet Robustness
Mitigating the vulnerability due to increasing centralization of online content
Custom Applications
Systems Integration
Non-Profit
Their Challenge
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society wants to keep linked content on the internet accessible. Links can fail because of denial of service attacks, censorship, or link rot. Reliably accessing linked content is a problem for Internet users everywhere. The Berkman Center approached pod to build tools for website creators to keep content they’ve linked to available.
Our Approach
pod designed and implemented plugins for the most popular open source content management systems (Drupal, WordPress) and web servers (Apache, Nginx).
Project Outcomes
Amber — an open source tool for websites to provide their visitors persistent routes to information — is now available. It automatically preserves a snapshot of every page linked to on a website, giving visitors a fallback option if links become inaccessible. So if we were to link to another website from this article, and that destination website were to go down, you can still access a stored, alternate version of the destination website. This safeguards the promise of the URL: that information placed online can remain there, even amidst network or endpoint disruptions.
Amber is now available for Apache and Nginx webservers, as well as Drupal and WordPress-based websites.
Technology Stack
This project presented an interesting technology challenge: how to create a maintainable software solution that provides the same end user experience and functionality for different types of systems (web servers, content management systems), each with their own extension model.
pod created a shared PHP library to handle the core ‘snapshot’ functionality, and common front-end Javascript to drive the end user experience. Each platform has custom code providing the “glue” to integrate Amber into the page delivery process, implemented in PHP for WordPress and Drupal, and in C for Apache and Nginx.
