https://infopirate.org/ What the web lost, and how to keep what you save. A custody record of the services people saved links into. en Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://infopirate.org/search-engine-all-social-bookmark-services https://infopirate.org/search-engine-all-social-bookmark-services In February 2007 this address published a custom search engine covering fifty social bookmarking services; nineteen years later eight of those names still offer somewhere to save a link, one survives read-only, and the largest single category is not shut down but nobody can now establish what happened. Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://infopirate.org/_social-bookmark-search https://infopirate.org/_social-bookmark-search Every tool in this space claims full-text search, and the phrase covers at least four different products — the URL and title, the fetched readable text, the stored snapshot, and an embedding index — which behave completely differently the moment the source page goes offline. Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://infopirate.org/_top-50-social-networking-firefox-addons https://infopirate.org/_top-50-social-networking-firefox-addons A 2008 list of more than fifty Firefox add-ons for sharing and bookmarking is now a record of an assumption that did not survive: that the browser would be the neutral ground where every service met. Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://infopirate.org/bm_mind-opening-philosophy-article-reality https://infopirate.org/bm_mind-opening-philosophy-article-reality This address held one saved link, catalogued into a Diigo group and cited from there. The record survives in someone else’s index; the page it pointed at does not, and cannot be recovered from what the record kept. Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://infopirate.org/user/register https://infopirate.org/user/register This path served a registration form until about 2010; no accounts exist, no data is held, nothing will be restored, and the windows other services gave their users when they closed are the most useful thing this page can now show. Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://infopirate.org/_how-burn-dvd-iso-file-mac https://infopirate.org/_how-burn-dvd-iso-file-mac The page at this address in 2009 was promotional copy for a disc-copying product. What is worth recording instead is the archival idea underneath it: why people made disc images at all, and what replaced the practice. Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://infopirate.org/i-o-device-error-0x8007045d https://infopirate.org/i-o-device-error-0x8007045d A Windows Vista help thread from February 2007, preserved as a period document: what the error meant on the hardware of the time, what the thread concluded, and why none of it is current advice. Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://infopirate.org/vista-sidebar-gadgets-and-sidebar-styler-galleries https://infopirate.org/vista-sidebar-gadgets-and-sidebar-styler-galleries A February 2007 note about two new WinCustomize galleries is now a record of a whole distribution model for small desktop software — and of what happened to the things people uploaded to it. Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://infopirate.org/delicious-what-is-left/ https://infopirate.org/delicious-what-is-left/ The service that defined social bookmarking passed through five owners in fourteen years and was never deleted. This is its observable state today, checked rather than remembered. Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://infopirate.org/magnolia-restore-never-tested/ https://infopirate.org/magnolia-restore-never-tested/ Ma.gnolia lost every member’s collection in a single morning because the thing it called a backup was a file sync with no versioning, no integrity checking and no restore ever performed. Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://infopirate.org/pocket-csv-what-survives/ https://infopirate.org/pocket-csv-what-survives/ Migration guides say the export is straightforward. The question that actually costs people their library is narrower: which fields the export contains at all, and which of those any given importer reads. Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://infopirate.org/bookmark-sync-ceilings/ https://infopirate.org/bookmark-sync-ceilings/ Chrome stops syncing bookmarks at one hundred thousand nodes — a number enforced by default since March 2023, declared in Chromium’s source, absent from Google’s support article as late as a capture of 2025-12-26, and attached to an error state that in one case clears on a thirty-day timer rather than on anything a reader does. Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://infopirate.org/dead-links-in-a-collection/ https://infopirate.org/dead-links-in-a-collection/ Checking whether saved links still work is not one job but four, and the standard advice — use the Wayback Machine — answers only the third of them. Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000