The Wayback Machine for Gemini: 🏎️ Delorean Time Machine

2023-04-10 | #delorean #archive | @Acidus

> Dr. Emmett Brown: The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?

I've built Delorean, a Wayback Machine for Gemini. The archive contains content from Dec 2021 to today. Not only gemtext, but plain text, images, PDFs, binary files, really any content under 5 MB in size and that's not excluded by robots.txt. Seriously, I pulled some Amiga m68k binaries out of it yesterday! 🥳

Features:

Captures! Delorean keeps "captures" of a URL's contents, even as it changes. You can go back and see previous versions.

Navigation header: Similar to the Wayback machine, archived content is displayed with a header telling you when the content was captured and allowing you to easily just to other versions of the content

Link rewriting: Gemini URLs in the gemtext are re-written on the fly to point to content in the archive. This allows you to browse the past content of a capsule as if it was live.

Raw Mode: You can view and download contents from Delorean in Raw mode, without the header or link rewriting.

Search: You can see content by searching for a specific URL, or search by content in the URL. I find it very helpful to use search and put in the domain name for a capsule.

🏎️ Delorean Time Machine

I'm certainly aware of the privacy concerns of building an archive, and I'm trying to do that in a way that doesn't make people uncomfortable. Please read the FAQ for more info, including how to exclude your capsule or its content from Delorean or any other Gemini archiver.

Delorean Frequently Asked Questions.

Examples

Browsable archive of Drew DeVault's offline capsule

Captures of Antenna's homepage, over time

Captures of the Gemini specification, over time

Next Steps

@mozz made an archive comprised of three separate gemini crawls that were made between September 2020 to November 2020, in the WARC format, and nicely uploaded these to The Internet Archive. Downloading these, extracting the content and adding them as captures to Delorean makes sense.

Gemini Archive

If you have older content or archives, please get in touch so I can add it

Submitting historic content to the Archive