Named for the famous Tim Berners-Lee quote, django-cool-urls is a little library that lets you link to a web page or embedded video from your site, and should that link ever die (the site removed the page, or just died altogether, etc.) your site will swap out the external link for a local copy.
this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
10 points (100.0% liked)
Django
391 readers
5 users here now
Django Project
- Django Project, the web framework for perfectionists with deadlines
- Django Code of Conduct
- Django Documentation
- Django Blog/News
- Support Django
Django Community
- Discord
- Project forum
- StackOverflow
- #django IRC Channel
- Django Users mailing list
- Django Developers mailing list
- Jazzband, a community maintaining Python projects
Django Ecosystem
Jobs
Learning/Docs
- Django Project tutorial
- Django Girls Tutorial
- Django Packages
- Classy Class-Based Views
- Classy Django REST Framework
- Classy DB
Podcasts:
Related Fediverse communities
- #django on Mastodon
- c/Python on programming.dev
- c/PostgreSQL on programming.dev
Feeds
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
So is this basically caching every foreign page and video you link to?
Yup. But it only swaps out the link from remote to local if show_local is set to True, which can be done automatically if the remote URL ever 404s.
It would be more cool with better descriptions and visual examples
It's certainly an interesting project, and addresses an important concern (link rot). But the security implications of archiving arbitrary sites/js and then running that on your own domain are rather horrifying to me (especially if this would be used for any user supplied links).
Personally, I'd rather have a service that automatically submits any external links to an existing archiver (archive.org) and then falls back to that source when the original 404s, rather than serving those pages/videos locally.
Yeah I thought about the security cases, but decided it wasn't a problem for my situation since I was only archiving links that I'm selecting. If I were to open this to us, yeah that's a real risk. I should probably add something about this in the docs.
The suggestion of pointing to archive.org was floated to me by someone on Mastodon actually, and I think I'll probably add that option as well. Just not right now. I'm tired 😆