Link-rot protection

Every external link in your articles gets an Internet Archive wildcard sibling automatically. When an original source dies, readers still reach the archived version in one click.

External links die. Studies of major newspapers have found that 20–50% of outbound links are dead within a decade. For an independent publication covering serious topics — regulation, institutional power, historical context — link rot directly undermines the evidence trail.

Project Broadsheet ships automatic link-rot protection: every external URL in Markdown content gets a second sibling link pointing at the Internet Archive's wildcard snapshot URL. The wildcard (web.archive.org/web/*/URL) auto-redirects to whatever the latest archived copy is. One click, reader reaches the cached version; zero ongoing maintenance.

How it works

Project Broadsheet hooks into the Markdown renderer. After Markdown produces a link like:

<a href="https://example.com/article">Source</a>

The renderer appends a sibling archive link:

<a href="https://example.com/article">Source</a><a class="archive-link"
  href="https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://example.com/article"
  rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank" aria-label="Archived version"
  title="Archived version">
  <svg>...</svg>
</a>

The archive icon — a tiny arrow-return SVG — renders inline at subscript scale via .archive-link. It doesn't interrupt reading. Readers who notice and click it get redirected to the latest available snapshot.

What gets skipped

• Links to your own domain (no point archiving yourself).
• Links that are already web.archive.org or archive.today / .is / .ph / .org URLs (already archived).
• Any link marked data-no-archive in the source HTML.
• Non-http(s) URLs (mailto, tel, local anchors).

Styling

.archive-link {
  display: inline-flex;
  width: 1.05em; height: 1.05em;
  margin-left: 0.15em;
  border: 1px solid currentColor;
  color: var(--color-ink-faint);
  opacity: 0.55;
}
.archive-link:hover {
  opacity: 1;
  color: var(--color-bg);
  background: var(--color-ink);
}

A thin outlined icon that inverts to ink-on-background on hover. Unobtrusive in body text; visible enough to find.

In print

The archive icons collapse to readable [archived] markers in printed output so paper copies still carry the reference:

@media print {
  .archive-link svg { display: none; }
  .archive-link::before { content: "[archived] "; }
}

Configuration

The renderer lives in eleventy.config.js as a markdown-it post-render pass. Toggle it off per-link with a data-no-archive attribute in raw HTML, or globally by removing the renderer pass from the config.

There's no Wayback Machine API call at build time — the wildcard URL is a pure client-side redirect handled by archive.org. This means:

• Zero network dependency at build time. Link-rot protection never blocks or slows a build.
• Links work even if archive.org has never seen the target. The wildcard URL simply resolves to archive.org's "no snapshot found" page, which offers the reader a "Save this page" button.
• Readers get the freshest snapshot available, because * is a "latest known" redirect rather than a frozen timestamp.

Proactive archiving

Because the wildcard redirects to whatever exists, pieces that have never been archived send readers to a dead end. To guarantee a snapshot, manually save each source link via web.archive.org/save when you publish — or wire a post-publish script that POSTs every outbound link for preservation. This is best practice for investigations where primary-source integrity matters most.

Related

• Markdown reference — the renderer this plugs into.
• Article profiles — citation metadata for pieces that need formal bibliographies.