Work Text:
Chapter 1: Why you should care
Chapter Text
A patient Wayback Machine archiver • MIT, on PyPI • ships with a Claude Code skill
- what it is
- a patient wayback machine archiver
- built with
- python, sqlite, a claude code skill
- status
- v0.3.0, mit licensed, on pypi
- shipped
- early july 2026
The web forgets faster than people think. Pew Research Center measured it in 2024: 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible ten years later, and a quarter of all pages that existed at any point between 2013 and 2023 are already gone. Even the durable-looking stuff rots: 23% of news pages contain at least one broken link.
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine can preserve almost any public page, but only if someone asks it to, at the right time, and keeps asking when the Archive is too busy to answer. That "keep patiently asking" part is tedious for a human and perfect for software. Internet Historian is that software: it does the asking, forever, in the background.