Replacing Legacy Sites with Low Maintenance Statically Hosted Web Archive-powered Mirrors
Are you a library web site maintainer managing a growing set legacy sites? Key site running on an obsolete stack with security issues that you can’t afford to update? Funding has been cut, but a site you’re responsible for is useful to a small community or key stakeholder? Don’t want to break links, lose functionality, or move the site to some external service, but the cost of maintenance is too high?
This talk presents an approach of a ‘archive-powered web site mirror’, where an entire website or web application can be crawled and then replaced with an interactive, but fully statically hosted (eg. via Apache/Nginx or even GitHub pages, etc…) with all links still working and content intact, on the same domain (or optionally a different one).
We’ll cover how this works, the open source tools you need to make it happen, and of course limitations and trade-offs of this approach. We’ll provide some simple examples, and time permitting, discuss how this approach can be extended to multi-site mirrors linked together and other more complex scenarios, all powered by statically hosted web archives requiring minimal maintenance.