Today we bid adieu

Greetings, reporters. We are gathered here today to bid adieu to two of the tools from this year, which have already passed on from this world wide web.

PopUp Archive and Silk have both announced they’re closing up shop, so we’re going to explain how to save your project before it, too, becomes a droopy 404 page. This situation also inspired a post on saving and archiving your work, but I will save that for another TFR.

In the meantime, here’s Noah Cutter ,from Vermont Public Radio, who figured out a way to preserve Silk projects like this one:

A few months ago, Hilary Niles gave a great overview of Silk, a data viz tool. She tellingly ended her post with, “And it’s free! (At least for now, while they figure out their business model.)”

Unfortunately that business model was to “get bought,” and thus Silk will cease operating this month (just enough time for you to scrape out your projects!).

There’s a relatively straightforward process to “flatten” a Silk project into something portable. You lose out on some of the interactivity, but avoid errors later down the line.