Permanent Reference Media (2026/09/11 Addendum)
A quick addendum to my previous post
Guys, guys, I made something Claude made something mildly interesting. Long story short, I had the idea of making a tool like SingleFile, but for entire websites instead of individual web pages. Not knowing a lick of JavaScript or of any libraries built for that, I asked Claude to take over the idea, which it sycophantically ran with and finished. With that, and a few other updates on the archival side of things, I thought I’d make a quick post addendum.
Compressius
The idea of Compressius is pretty simple: SingleFile, but for entire websites. Upload a zipped file, configure it to your liking, and generate an archive of a static site as a single HTML file. That file can be opened locally, with no JS or remote images/scripts. It can also be uploaded to an archival protocol like IPFS or Blossom (either directly to Blossom or in the form of an Nsite). To get around the fact that the whole site is one page, it gives you a fake but usable address bar for basic navigation, and is about as future proof as a single file archive of a site can be.
If you want to use the tool and you already use a static site generator like I do (Hugo), then it’s as simple as generating a build of the site, compressing it as a zip, and uploading it to the tool. A few moments of in browser processing later and you’ll have your entire site archived as a single HTML file. If you have a dynamic site, such as one hosted by WordPress - or if you want a personal archive of an external site - you can use the following command to generate a local static site from any backend.
wget -mpEk4 --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/126.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" --wait=2 --random-wait --limit-rate=200k --waitretry=10 --tries=3 "https://nate.mecca1.net/"
The great thing about a tool like this is that even though the tool itself might be a disposable vibe coded project, truly static local web content is like a text document or PDF in that it’s pretty future proof. I’m going to transition my permanent reference page to be based around semi-regular full-site Compressius archives. I’ll still be sharing individual post hashes via Nostr links, and clumps of posts via the “Untitled Chronicles,” but these archives will be the bulk of my site archives - what you’d use if you wanted to link to an unmodified version of one of my posts, or to access my content when my server is down or my domain no longer resolves.
More Nostr Archiving
As with every post I make about one of these social media protocols, something changed within 48 hours that warranted an update. This post was no different. In this case, the Ditto plugin by Soapbox (Chromium, Gecko) can now archive pages by exporting them as a static HTML file shared as an Nsite. It’s a cool feature that combines grassroots archiving, like Archive.org’s Wayback Machine, with the decentralized Blossom protocol. I’d be slightly concerned about copyright liability for archiving external sites, but the Internet Archive has survived so far. Soapbox likely protected by Section 230, and I doubt it’s users would likely be sued only because they’re A) small fish and B) minimally tracked as long as they don’t use a key tied to their identity.
Gutenberg/Wikipedia Nostr mirrors
Beyond the page archiving, I also failed to mention that there’s a project archiving all of Project Gutenberg on Nostr, with Wikipedia coming soon. Unlike Ditto’s feature, this has been going on for a while - I was just unaware of it. But yeah, we’ve already got content like Project Gutenberg mirrored on decentralized, permanent reference protocols and served through a user friendly gui. Here’s a link to the archive, and here’s a link to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (a good read that’s in the public domain).
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