Web Archiving: WebRecorder Has a New Name: Confier & ReplayWeb.page Launches

The wonderful and useful web archiving tool (free) WebRecorder has a new name, Conifer. All services, tools, logins, remain the same. If you have never taken a look Conifer it’s 100% worthy of your attention.

Details via A Conifer Blog Post by Dragan Espenschied:

Rhizome is taking over permanent stewardship of Webrecorder.io with two main changes:

• The name of the service is now Conifer, and
• the URL is now https://conifer.rhizome.org

Rhizome previously operated the Webrecorder.io service as a research and development project, which is now permanently integrated into the digital preservation program as Conifer. Rhizome is committed to maintaining and improving this service to serve the web archiving needs of our community, and that of the greater digital culture sector.

Direct to Complete Blog Post

But wait, there’s more:

On the Launch of Replay.page in this Blog Post by Ilya Kreymer:

Thanks to generous support from the Mellon Foundation, Webrecoder was able to join Rhizome and together this hosted service was developed with a robust set of features, including remote browser and Autopilot automation, providing high-fidelity web archiving with a trusted cultural and digital arts institution. The hosted service known as webrecorder.io has now been renamed to Conifer and Rhizome will continue to run this unique service and build new features around this service. See Rhizome’s blog post for more details about Conifer and a brief post on the Conifer blog.

With the launch of Conifer, Rhizome will focus on running a brand new web archiving service, while Webrecorder will focus on software development.

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Six years ago, when Webrecorder.io was started, high-fidelity web archive replay was possible only through a hosted service/centralized server. But with advances in browser and web technology, along with growth in decentralized web and storage, this is certainly no longer the case! Today’s browsers can natively run all sorts of applications, including a fully-featured web archive replay system.

Previously, I’ve introduced wabac.js, as a fully Javascript, browser-based experiment for rendering web archive replay. Today, I want to announce ReplayWeb.page, a new, fully featured browser-based replay system (or ‘wayback machine’) that further develops this idea.

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Webrecorder’s original goal of ‘web archives for all’ can only be realized when users have the tools to create and view web archives, on their own devices, or having a choice as to where to store their data. ReplayWeb.page takes a step further in this direction, by allowing a wide array of options for web archive storage. Have web archives on an institutional repository, or S3, or any cloud storage? No problem! ReplayWeb.page can load web archives directly from there!

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Perhaps you are confused about what tools will be provided by whom. Don’t worry! Here is a more clear deliniation:

• If you are interested in running web archiving tools on your own, running a desktop app, pywb, ReplayWeb.page, etc… Webrecorder will continue maintaining these tools! If you would like to integrate web archiving into other software or service, Webrecorder is here to help!
• If you are looking for a well-established arts non-profit that has been committed to digital preservation to provide a dedicated web archiving service, then Rhizome’s Conifer is for you!

Learnm MUCH More, Read the Complete Blog Post

Direct to ReplayWeb.page

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Data Files, Digital Preservation, News, Open Access, Patrons and Users, Preservation