Aral Balkan<p>Ooh, what’s this?… Look Over There!<br>(With apologies to Jaida Essence Hall)</p><p>So the little app I teased earlier is ready and deployed and I have our own instance running at:</p><p><a href="https://look-over-there.small-web.org" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="">look-over-there.small-web.org</span><span class="invisible"></span></a></p><p>Look Over There! lets you forward multiple domains to different URLs with full HTTPS support.</p><p>Why?</p><p>We have a number of older sites that are becoming a chore/expensive to maintain and yet I don’t want to break the web. So I thought, hey, I’ll just use the “url forwarding” feature of my domain registrar to forward them to their archived versions on archive.org.</p><p>Ah, not so fast, young cricket… seems some domain registrars’ implementations of this feature do not work if the domain being forwarded is accessed via HTTPS (yes, in 2025).</p><p>So, given Kitten¹ uses Auto Encrypt² to automatically provision Let’s Encrypt certificates, I added a domain forwarding feature to it and created Look Over There! as a friendly/simple app that provides a visual interface to it.</p><p>To see it in action, hit <a href="https://cleanuptheweb.org" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="">cleanuptheweb.org</span><span class="invisible"></span></a> and you should get forwarded to the archived version of it on archive.org. I’m going to be adding more of our sites to the list in the coming days as part of an effort to reduce my maintenance load and cut down our expenses at Small Technology Foundation.</p><p>Since it’s Small Web, this particular instance is just for us. However, you can run your own copy on a VPS (or even a little single-board computer at home, etc.) A link to the source code repository is on the site. Once Domain³ is ready for use (later this year 🤞), setting up your own instance of a Small Web app at your own server will take less than a minute.</p><p>I hope this little tool, along with the 404→307 (evergreen web) technique⁴, helps us to nurture an evergreen web and avoid link rot. (And the source code, as little as there is because Kitten does so much for you, is a good resource if you want to learn about Kitten’s new class-based component and page model which I haven’t yet had a chance to properly document.)</p><p>Enjoy!</p><p>:kitten:💕</p><p>¹ <a href="https://kitten.small-web.org" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="">kitten.small-web.org</span><span class="invisible"></span></a><br>² <a href="https://codeberg.org/small-tech/auto-encrypt" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">codeberg.org/small-tech/auto-e</span><span class="invisible">ncrypt</span></a><br>³ <a href="https://codeberg.org/domain/app" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="">codeberg.org/domain/app</span><span class="invisible"></span></a><br>⁴ <a href="https://4042307.org" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="">4042307.org</span><span class="invisible"></span></a></p><p><a href="https://mastodon.ar.al/tags/LookOverThere" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>LookOverThere</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.ar.al/tags/Kitten" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Kitten</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.ar.al/tags/SmallWeb" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SmallWeb</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.ar.al/tags/SmallTech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SmallTech</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.ar.al/tags/web" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>web</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.ar.al/tags/archiving" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>archiving</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.ar.al/tags/evergreenWeb" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>evergreenWeb</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.ar.al/tags/dontBreakTheWeb" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>dontBreakTheWeb</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.ar.al/tags/LetsEncrypt" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>LetsEncrypt</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.ar.al/tags/https" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>https</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.ar.al/tags/TLS" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TLS</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.ar.al/tags/webForwarding" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>webForwarding</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.ar.al/tags/urlForwarding" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>urlForwarding</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.ar.al/tags/Domain" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Domain</span></a></p>