Very promising and extremely useful

  • mgoi

    (@mgoi)


    9 years ago

    Many thanks to the developers for this must-have plugin for anyone running an academic database using WordPress. The plugin provides a great solution to tackle link decay that does not involve manually creating links on perma.cc etc.

    A few words on areas of possible improvement:
    – better documentation for creation of local folder (and the pesky permission issues) in which archives are created
    – better documentation of how to access locally stored archives (I still haven’t found how to do this)
    – fix the selection of the places where archives are created: for now it seemingly randomly chooses among the three options I selected (local, perks.cc and internet archive), rather than creating three archives systematically
    – better error messages – a large number of links are not archived and there is no explanation as to why that is

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Author jeffreylicht

    (@jeffreylicht)

    Thanks for trying out Amber, and for your helpful feedback!

    We’re in the process of fixing a few bugs that you’ve encountered, and will be releasing a new version shortly. Specifically:

    – There was a bug that prevented the Amber Dashboard from displaying the reason why links weren’t preserved, which is being fixed.

    – There’s a configurable limit on the size of snapshots that Amber creates, to prevent any single snapshot from using up excessive amounts of disk space. The default is 1MB, which isn’t sufficient for many sites once you include assets such as images, javascript, etc. We’re going to increase the default, but in the meantime you can change it on the Amber Settings page ( the field is “Maximum file size (kB)”). It’s likely that this is the reason that many of your links are not being preserved. It might also account for the perceived randomness around where links are saved – if a link is over the size limit it would be saved on the Internet Archive and Perma, but not on the local server.

    Regarding access to locally saved archives: if the archive was saved successfully you will see a “View” link under the Site Name when you hover over a row in the dashboard. Clicking on this will display the locally saved archive.

    Regarding the creation of the local folder: could you share some details of the permissions problems you encountered, and the environment on which you’re running WordPress? We haven’t seen this problem before – creation of the folder should be completely automatic.

    Thanks again!

    Thread Starter mgoi

    (@mgoi)

    Hi there,

    Thank you for your response, and thanks again for developing this extremely useful tool.

    Apparent randomness of storage location. Your comments are noted. I had set the maximum file size to 3000kB but size limitation may be the reason why some targets are not locally saved. This will become clearer with your planned update, which I understand will display more information when targets are not saved.

    Access to local archives. It took me some time to find it in the documentation, but I have now found the fix, which is properly documented. Rsetting the permalink settings in WordPress did the trick.

    Permissions. This is the usual WordPress plague, which prevented Amber from creating folders. I have since manually updated the permissions on the folder, which fixed the issue. I am running the whole database behind .htpassword in Apache so I do not have too many concerns in opening up permissions on some folders.

    Keep up the good work, it is greatly appreciated!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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