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Colophon

What this site is made of, and the parts of it that are known to be fragile.

Published 2026-08-06 · Status of facts checked 2026-08-06

Build

Hand-written HTML served as flat files, one stylesheet, four font files. No JavaScript, on any page. No framework, no build step required to publish a change, no third-party request of any kind, no cookies, no analytics. Anything that needs a server in 2026 is a page that returns an error in 2036, and this publication’s whole subject is what happens to things that need someone to keep running them.

There is no search box. A search box on a static site is either a lie or a third-party script; the archive is one complete page and a browser’s own find function does the same job without sending anyone a query.

Type

Two families, two roles, never mixed. Source Serif 4 by Frank Grießhammer for Adobe carries everything that is read; IBM Plex Mono by Mike Abbink and Bold Monday carries every label, date, table cell and citation. Both are licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and are served from this domain; the licence texts ship alongside them at /fonts/OFL-Source-Serif-4.txt and /fonts/OFL-IBM-Plex-Mono.txt.

Colour

Warm paper, near-black ink, one hairline rule and one link colour. Beyond those, the only saturated ink on this site states custody: a service is Kept, Read-only, Moved, Gone or Unverified. Every chip carries its state as text as well as colour, so nothing depends on seeing the difference. A dark theme remaps those ten values and nothing else.

Images

There are none. This site publishes no illustrations, no screenshots and no diagrams — it is text and tables, and every argument here is carried by prose and by the Ledger.

Two rules are set down now, before any image exists. Any illustration added later will be machine-generated and will carry a fixed label directly beneath it saying so, and none will ever depict a real document or artefact. Any screen capture will be real, cropped but never retouched, and will carry its capture URL and capture date in the same slot every time. The two categories are meant to look nothing alike, so that a generated picture can never be mistaken for evidence.

Known weaknesses

Recorded openly, because a colophon that lists only strengths is advertising.

• The Ledger is hand-kept. Its rows are re-checked twice a year by a person, and between re-checks a status can be wrong without anything signalling it. This is why every row prints its checked date rather than implying freshness.
• Status words are a judgement at the edges. Three roster entries — Zimbio, NowPublic and Squidoo — are recorded as Gone although each domain still serves something. In every case what it serves is not a place to save a link, and calling them “kept” would answer a question no reader is asking.
• Underscore-prefixed addresses. Three pages here are served at paths beginning with an underscore, because that is where the citations point: /_social-bookmark-search, /_top-50-social-networking-firefox-addons and /_how-burn-dvd-iso-file-mac. Several static hosts and site generators silently drop such files. Any future migration must check those three addresses first, by name.
• Thirty of fifty roster rows read “could not be verified”. That is the honest state of the record, and it will make this census look weaker than confident lists elsewhere.

Use of the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive was used to establish what existed at which address on which date. It is a source of dates, titles and structure, not of sentences: no text from the previous site at this domain, and no user’s saved bookmark, is reproduced here.