Links break. It’s one of the sad facts of the web — a blog post you linked to five years ago might just be gone today. The domain expired, the server was shut down, or the page was quietly removed. This is called link rot, and studies suggest that over 25% of all web links eventually stop working.
I built Wayback Link Preserver to do something about it, specifically for Micro.blog.
What it does
The plugin scans the external links in your blog posts and checks if they’re still alive. For broken links, it looks up the Internet Archive Wayback Machine for an archived copy. If one exists, a small green “View archived copy” badge appears next to the link, giving your readers a one-click fallback to the content you originally linked to.
Working links are left completely untouched. No icons, no styling, nothing changes.
How it works
When a reader visits one of your posts, two things happen:
- Every external link gets a quick liveness check. These run in parallel and are fast — usually under a second for a typical post.
- For any link where the server didn’t respond (expired domain, server offline, DNS failure), the plugin queries the Wayback Machine to find an archived snapshot.
Results are cached in the reader’s browser, so repeat visits don’t trigger any new requests.
The whole thing runs client-side — no server needed, no database, no background jobs. It’s just JavaScript that gets injected via the Micro.blog plugin system.
What it can’t do
Since the plugin runs in the browser, it can only detect server-level failures: domains that no longer exist, servers that are offline, connections that time out. It cannot detect a 404 page on an otherwise working server — the server still responds, but with an error page. Detecting that would require a server-side component, which Micro.blog’s plugin architecture doesn’t support.
Inspired by
Automattic and the Internet Archive recently released a Wayback Machine Link Fixer for WordPress. It’s a great plugin with server-side link checking, background jobs, and proactive archiving. I wanted something similar for Micro.blog, adapted to the constraints of a static site.
Try it
The plugin is open source and available on GitHub: wayback-link-preserver
You can install it from the Micro.blog plugin directory, or add it manually via Design → Edit Custom Themes → New Plug-in.
If you care about your links surviving the years, give it a try.