Memento TimeGate URIs for better integration with Wayback

[hariharshankar]

This is a really cool extension. It would be great if in addition to archiving, the extension could also integrate the Wordpress posts with their archived pages in the Internet Archive. The Memento protocol provides a way to do that.

The Memento protocol introduces the notion of datetime negotiation, inspired by content negotiation, that allows a client to request a version of a resource as it existed at a specified time in the past. This Introduction to Memento gives a brief technical overview.

The Memento protocol is supported by all major web archives, including the Internet Archive, and also by many version control systems like the W3C technical specs and wikis.

For this extension, by simply adding a TimeGate URI in the Link header of the HTTP response headers, Memento clients like the Memento for Chrome extension can make it straightforward to navigate between the current Wordpress pages and their archived versions.

Internet Archive has a TimeGate URI for each of its archived pages. This gives access to versions of that archived page as they existed at a certain datetime. Archiver can also provide a similar TimeGate URI in its HTTP Response Headers for all of the pages that it pushes in the Internet Archive. The TimeGate URI can simply point to the Internet Archive's TimeGate like http://web.archive.org/web/<original_uri>.

For example, the HTTP response headers for the post https://profiles.wordpress.org/mcguive7/ will look like:

$ curl -I https://profiles.wordpress.org/mcguive7/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
...
Link: <http://web.archive.org/web/https://profiles.wordpress.org/mcguive7>; rel="timegate"
...

This will make it straight-forward for Memento clients like the Memento for Chrome, or the Time Travel Portal, to follow this TimeGate URI to automatically land on the archived versions of the pages as it was around the requested datetime.

Please let me know if you need more information, I am happy to help.