Practical articles for anyone who has to show what a web page said, and when: lawyers, compliance teams, researchers and journalists. How pages disappear, what makes a capture hold up, and how to keep one.
A crawler following links misses pages and drags in others. A sitemap is the site's own list of pages. How to find it, narrow it to one section, and capture every page on it.
8 min readIn a civil claim in England and Wales, a disclosed web capture is taken as authentic unless the other side serves a notice to prove it. What that notice changes, and the evidence that answers it.
10 min readA URL and an access date tell the reader where you looked, not what you saw. How to cite web sources so a footnote can still be checked after the page moves, changes or goes.
7 min readYour supplier's terms sit on a web page they can edit. How to keep dated copies of the terms, the data processing addendum and the sub-processor list, and spot a change inside your objection window.
7 min readReading two copies of a page side by side is how a changed clause gets missed. How to compare them with free tools, strip out the noise, and write up the difference so a reader can check it.
7 min readThe FCA treats a website that invites investment as a financial promotion, and COBS 4.11 requires an adequate record. What to keep, for how long, and how to record a page that keeps changing.
10 min readWrite to a rival about a misleading claim and they have five working days to reply, and every reason to edit the page first. What to capture before you send that letter, and how.
9 min readA web capture is only as good as your account of who made it and who has held it since. The links in a chain of custody for a captured page, and the log that lets you prove each one.
7 min readA screenshot shows what you saw, a PDF shows what the browser printed, and a web capture keeps the page itself. What each one records, where each falls short, and when to use which.
8 min readAsked what your terms said on the day a customer signed up, the live page is the wrong answer. What to record, how long to keep it, and how to build a version history you can produce.
8 min readA page you capture daily can still change twice between captures. How to choose a capture frequency from what a missed version would cost, with starting intervals for terms, prices and claims.
8 min readA hash shows that a file has not changed since it was hashed. It does not show the file is genuine, or when it was made. What a SHA-256 hash proves, what it can't, and what to pair it with.
7 min readWARC is the format libraries and web archives use to store captured pages. What is inside one, how to open and check it with free tools, and when you need one instead of a PDF.
8 min readA timestamp is only worth something if someone can check it. What an RFC 3161 token proves, how to read one, and the OpenSSL commands that verify it against the file, step by step.
9 min readThe Wayback Machine is often the only record of what a site used to say. Courts treat it with more caution than many people expect. What a Wayback capture shows, where it falls short, and when you need your own copy.
6 min readA screenshot shows what a page looked like, but not where it came from, when, or that nobody touched it since. What a capture needs to record to hold up when someone disputes it, and a checklist for doing it properly.
8 min readA quarter of the web pages that existed between 2013 and 2023 are gone, and half the links in US Supreme Court opinions no longer show what they cited. The research on link rot and content drift, and what it means for anything you cite.
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