Have you ever found yourself slightly modifying a URL to try to find something you know used to exist or should exist but you keep getting that dreaded 404 page? Perhaps you were trying to find something that shouldn’t be online anymore but it was simply unlinked to, benevolent purposes or otherwise? Another example might be that a site’s main homepage is down and so many users are unable to access the site. If they had a list of URLs they could see which are still valid very quickly with the URL Archive and go to the site through those URLs. Google cache and Wayback Machine get you pretty close to what you’re after but sometimes they just fall a little too short. Some things are beyond even Google’s giant umbrella of web applications (at least for now).
I’m sure an application focusing more on URLs is somebody’s 10% project somewhere sitting on the backburner until they have time to finish it. It seems like almost anything you’d want to do has a corresponding web application. When I come across a need that doesn’t I just feel like that void should soon be filled. I’m going to outline the application that I believe would fill this void. Maybe in future posts I’ll also walkthrough my attempts to do it as my personal .5% project. Continue reading →
