Every so often we take a snapshot of our website, to preserve exactly what it looked like, and simplify removing outdated content. While it’s important to prevent ROT, we also have an obligation to preserve a historical archive of what’s on our site. You can find the most recent site archive is available at https://2016sitearchive.lanecc.edu.
Unlike our current website, which is backed by a database, and which tracks even the smallest change to a page, the archive is a static set of HTML pages, and will not change further. While this means we’ll lose a little bit of history, we felt it to be a necessary compromise. Drupal, like WordPress of Joomla, is complex software, and to prevent security issues needs to be kept up to date and occasionally upgraded. HTML, on the other hand, isn’t interactive in the same way, and is mostly bulletproof. And, since it’s much simpler, it requires a lot less hardware to run.
The down side of these snapshots is that they will eventually decay. Links to external sites will go bad as other sites remove changes. Videos will be removed, and embeds will no longer work. But the content of our pages will stick around. So we can proceed less cautiously with removing content from the website, since to preserve it for the public all we need to do is link it to the archive.
If you’re interested in our last snapshot, from five years ago, you can visit https://2011sitearchive.lanecc.edu
Older snapshots are more limited, often just an image of the homepage. You can view them here:
Full details, along with further history and notes are available on the webguide pages.