Django Cool URLs

Tim Berners-Lee is credited with saying that "cool URLs don't change", but sadly that's just not the case. Cool URLs are changing all the time because the people who run those sites are moving stuff around or just deleting whole pages and domains.

If you have a long-running site full of links like a blog however, this means that over time your site can be pointing to a lot of dead links, which is bad for your SEO. It's also annoying when you're looking over a post from 10 years ago that says something like "this is some really nice work" and that link 404s.

With django-cool-urls, you can link to whatever you like and the state of that page is captured from the moment you linked to it. If the page ever disappears from the web, you can automatically switch over to the local copy.

All you need to do is switch from doing this:

<a href="https://something-awesome.ca/">Nifty!</a>

to this:

<a href="{% cool_url 'https://something-awesome.ca/' %}">Nifty!</a>

If that page ever 404s, your site will switch to showing the locally cached version. Think of it like your own private archive.org.

Currently, this project supports caching most pages (see the Caveats page) as well as embedded video from YouTube, Vimeo, and Instagram.

• Official documentation
  • Installation
  • Configuration
  • How to use it
  • Caveats & troubleshooting
  • Development