Train coding

When I went up to London for the State of the Browser conference last month, I shared the train journey with Remy.

I always like getting together with Remy. We usually end up discussing sci-fi books we���re reading, commiserating with one another about conference-organising, discussing the minutiae of browser APIs, or talking about the big-picture vision of the World Wide Web.

On this train ride we ended up talking about the march of time and how death comes for us all ���and our websites.

Take The Session, for example. It���s been running for two and a half decades in one form or another. I plan to keep it running for many more decades to come. But I���m the weak link in that plan.

If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, The Session will keep running. The hosting is paid up for a while. The domain name is registered for as long as possible. But inevitably things will need to be updated. Even if no new features get added to the site, someone���s got to install updates to keep the underlying software safe and secure.

Remy and I discussed the long-term prospects for widening out the admin work to more people. But we also discussed smaller steps I could take in the meantime.

Like, there���s the actual content of the website. Now, I currently share exports from the database every week in JSON, CSV, and SQLite. That���s good. But you need to be tech nerd to do anything useful with that data.

The more I talked about it with Remy, the more I realised that HTML would be the most useful format for the most people.

There���s a cute acronym in the world of digital preservation: LOCKSS. Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. If there were multiple copies of The Session���s content out there in the world, then I���d have a nice little insurance policy against some future catastrophe befalling the live site.

With the seed of the idea planted in my head, I waited until I had some time to dive in and see if this was doable.

Fortunately I had plenty of opportunity to do just that on some other train rides. When I was in Spain and France recently, I spent hours and hours on trains. For some reason, I find train journeys very conducive to coding, especially if you don���t need an internet connection.

By the time I was back home, the code was done. Here���s the result:

The Session archive: a static copy of the content on thesession.org.

If you want to grab a copy for yourself, go ahead and download this .zip file. Be warned that it���s quite large! The .zip file is over two gigabytes in size and the unzipped collection of web pages is almost ten gigabytes. I plan to update the content every week or so.

I���ve put a copy up on Netlify and I���m serving it from the subdomain archive.thesession.org if you want to check out the results without downloading the whole thing.

Because this is a collection of static files, there���s no search. But you can use your browser���s ���Find in Page��� feature to search within the (very long) index pages of each section of the site.

You don���t need to a web server to click around between the pages: they should all work straight from your file system. Double-clicking any HTML file should give a starting point.

I wanted to reduce the dependencies on each page to as close to zero as I could. All the CSS is embedded in the the page. Likewise with most of the JavaScript (you���ll still need an internet connection to get audio playback and dynamic maps). This keeps the individual pages nice and self-contained. That means they can be shared around (as an email attachment, for example).

I���ve shared this project with the community on The Session and people are into it. If nothing else, it could be handy to have an offline copy of the site���s content on your hard drive for those situations when you can���t access the site itself.