Ofrenda for the Dead Web: an open-weight model writes calaveras for websites that died

Description and use

The project builds altars for defunct websites by extracting death dates, last archived pages, and generating poetic summaries with Gemma 4.

Problem

Websites shut down and their content disappears, leaving only archived copies that lack context and narrative.

Outcome

The tool successfully generated altars for 10 sites, including detailed cards for Friendster, Stadia, Yahoo Answers, Google+, and Vine, with verified death dates, last words, and poetic calaveras.

Workflow

• Search for death date and cause using SerpApi or DuckDuckGo.
• Verify the death date and exact words from the search result.
• Query the Internet Archive CDX API for the last good capture before the death date.
• Provide the page text to Gemma 4 to generate site description, last words, and a calavera.
• Verify that the last words appear verbatim in the archived page.
• Build a static HTML altar page with escaped content and safe links.
• Save all data (search results, model outputs, archive captures, checks) to a JSON file for traceability.

Evidence

An open-weight model found that line on the archived page, and code checked that it was really there, word for word.

Source

The Internet Archive's CDX API takes a to date, so one request returns the last good capture of the home page from before the day it died

Source

Gemma 4 gets the text of that page and returns what the site was, one sentence copied from the page as its last words, and a four-line calavera that may only use facts from the page and the cause of death.

Source

Each run saves everything it saw and said to a JSON file: the search results, every raw model answer, the archive capture, and the result of every check.

Source