Dealing with decommissioned and current homepage URLs for the same website

[crarugal]

By default, users are taken to the first capture of a target (when browsing Collections).

For example https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/3085?page=2

Clicking on the openly accessible copy will take us to the first capture, the homepage of which in 2010 was http://www.florence-nightingale.co.uk/cms/

However, the live site uses http://florence-nightingale.co.uk/ as the homepage, which isn't apparent to the user.

So navigating to the first capture, then to the calendar, will present the user with the captures of the URL that was first archived/viewing at the time:

But, there are actually recent captures of the current website:

https://www.webarchive.org.uk/act/targets/5311

I've not thought about the best way to deal with this, but it's something worth considering in any future updates

[anjackson]

As per ukwa/ukwa-services#81 (comment) it is possible to add an @alias mapping that makes the CDX lookup treat different URLs as if they were the same.

We could try experimenting with that, and if it provides a reasonable experience, consider ways of managing these aliases and making sure they're up to date.

[crarugal]

thanks, Andy, sounds like a fix worth exploring