A few random items for the future-safe web file.
A commenter on yesterday's post asked about my personal profile page from 1998, which was linked to from the RSS 2.0 spec, which I pointed to as an example of something that seems relatively well set up for longevity. The link was broken. I investigated, and found that it had been broken since I moved from Apache to Amazon S3, a while back. It was a perfect example of how easy it is to lose large amounts of web content. On Amazon S3 I set the default filename to index.html, and on Apache I had set it as default.html. This was almost certainly a mistake. I fixed this link by creating a copy of the home page at index.html and now it works.
Case-sensitive servers are bad for future-safety. I wish Amazon S3 had the option to tell the web server to be unicase. I ported scripting.com from a server that didn't care about case, Apache on Windows. A lot of the broken links in my old content, migrated to S3, would be fixed if I could set such an option true. It's a lot more difficult to fix with a patch, because folder names need to be case-insensitive too. Discussed in this Facebook thread.
Facebook "notes" could be a boon for future-safety or a new disaster. Yesterday I got lucky and spotted a new Facebook style of notes page, one that looks a bit like the pages produced by Medium. It got a ton of coverage in tech pubs, who saw it as Facebook wanting to attract bloggers. This could be a great thing, or a terrible thing, depending on how good the API is. If I can produce a version of MyWord that works with both Facebook notes and pages on the open web, then we'd have a fairly future-safe system, and one that others can build on. The best of both worlds. But if there is no API, we get another Medium, a nice-looking landfill for ideas, although we believe more in the longevity of Facebook than we do of Medium.