Ooh, whatās this?⦠Look Over There!
(With apologies to Jaida Essence Hall)
So the little app I teased earlier is ready and deployed and I have our own instance running at:
https://look-over-there.small-web.org
Look Over There! lets you forward multiple domains to different URLs with full HTTPS support.
Why?
We have a number of older sites that are becoming a chore/expensive to maintain and yet I donāt want to break the web. So I thought, hey, Iāll just use the āurl forwardingā feature of my domain registrar to forward them to their archived versions on archive.org.
Ah, not so fast, young cricket⦠seems some domain registrarsā implementations of this feature do not work if the domain being forwarded is accessed via HTTPS (yes, in 2025).
So, given Kitten¹ uses Auto Encrypt² to automatically provision Letās Encrypt certificates, I added a domain forwarding feature to it and created Look Over There! as a friendly/simple app that provides a visual interface to it.
To see it in action, hit https://cleanuptheweb.org and you should get forwarded to the archived version of it on archive.org. Iām going to be adding more of our sites to the list in the coming days as part of an effort to reduce my maintenance load and cut down our expenses at Small Technology Foundation.
Since itās Small Web, this particular instance is just for us. However, you can run your own copy on a VPS (or even a little single-board computer at home, etc.) A link to the source code repository is on the site. Once Domain³ is ready for use (later this year š¤), setting up your own instance of a Small Web app at your own server will take less than a minute.
I hope this little tool, along with the 404ā307 (evergreen web) techniqueā“, helps us to nurture an evergreen web and avoid link rot. (And the source code, as little as there is because Kitten does so much for you, is a good resource if you want to learn about Kittenās new class-based component and page model which I havenāt yet had a chance to properly document.)
Enjoy!
:kitten:š
¹ https://kitten.small-web.org
² https://codeberg.org/small-tech/auto-encrypt
³ https://codeberg.org/domain/app
ā“ https://4042307.org
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