Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
I'm not sure I'm a fan of this because it just turns WayBackMachine into another content silo. It's called the world wide web for a reason, and this isn't helping.<p>I can see it for corporate sites where they change content, remove pages, and break links without a moment's consideration.<p>But for my personal site, for example, I'd much rather you link to me directly rather than content in WayBackMachine. Apart from anything else linking to WayBackMachine only drives traffic to WayBackMachine, not my site. Similarly, when I link to other content, I want to show its creators the same courtesy by linking directly to their content rather than WayBackMachine.<p>What I can see, and I don't know if it exists yet (a quick search suggests perhaps not), is some build task that will check all links and replace those that are broken with links to WayBackMachine, or (perhaps better) generate a report of broken links and allow me to update them manually just in case a site or two happen to be down when my build runs.<p>I think it would probably need to treat redirects like broken links given the prevalence of corporate sites where content is simply removed and redirected to the homepage, or geo-locked and redirected to the homepage in other locales (I'm looking at you and your international warranty, and access to tutorials, Fender. Grr.).<p>I also probably wouldn't run it on every build because it would take a while, but once a week or once a month would probably do it.