Simon Willison’s Weblog

TIL: Downloading archived Git repositories from archive.softwareheritage.org (via) Back in February I blogged about a neat Python library called sqlite-s3vfs for accessing SQLite databases hosted in an S3 bucket, released as MIT licensed open source by the UK government's Department for Business and Trade.

I went looking for it today and found that the github.com/uktrade/sqlite-s3vfs repository is now a 404.

Since this is taxpayer-funded open source software I saw it as my moral duty to try and restore access! It turns out a full copy had been captured by the Software Heritage archive, so I was able to restore the repository from there. My copy is now archived at simonw/sqlite-s3vfs.

The process for retrieving an archive was non-obvious, so I've written up a TIL and also published a new Software Heritage Repository Retriever tool which takes advantage of the CORS-enabled APIs provided by Software Heritage. Here's the Claude Code transcript from building that.

# 30th December 2025, 11:51 pm / archives, git, github, open-source, tools, ai, til, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, claude-code

Using static websites for tiny archives (via) Alex Chan:

Over the last year or so, I’ve been creating static websites to browse my local archives. I’ve done this for a variety of collections, including:

• paperwork I’ve scanned
• documents I’ve created
• screenshots I’ve taken
• web pages I’ve bookmarked
• video and audio files I’ve saved

This is such a neat idea. These tiny little personal archive websites aren't even served through a localhost web server - they exist as folders on disk, and Alex browses them by opening up the index.html file directly in a browser.

# 17th October 2024, 11:02 pm / archives, html

NYT Flash-based visualizations work again. The New York Times are using the open source Ruffle Flash emulator - built using Rust, compiled to WebAssembly - to get their old archived data visualization interactives working again.

# 21st January 2024, 5:58 am / archives, flash, new-york-times, rust, webassembly

SIARD: Software Independent Archiving of Relational Databases (via) I hadn’t heard of this before but it looks really interesting: the Federal Archives of Switzerland developed a standard for archiving any relational database as a zip file full of XML which is “is used in over 50 countries around the globe”.

# 4th May 2022, 10:40 pm / archives, databases, xml

If You Don’t Date Your Work, It Sucks. I learnt this lesson the hard way, when I realised that I had no idea exactly what year I created my earliest web-facing projects.

# 18th January 2010, 5:46 pm / archives, dates, year