We’ve just deployed a new custom plugin across the Anarchist Federation network. Its job is simple in spirit, heavy in practice: automatically detect media inside the articles we aggregate and embed it directly into the page.
That includes YouTube, Twitter/X, Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, and anything else we can reasonably embed. More importantly for our long-term mission, it also detects PDF links and archives them locally. When an article references a remote PDF, our servers now download it, store it, and serve it from our own infrastructure.
Why? Because websites disappear. Links rot. History gets quietly erased.
Our project is about preserving the record of anarchist struggles, movements, repression, and resistance. Archiving primary sources, including documents and reports published as PDFs, is part of that work.
This system also tries to be smart about how it does things:
-
If content is already embedded, we preserve it as is.
-
If a plain link points to embeddable content, we insert the embed between paragraphs without breaking the text flow.
-
Everything is done automatically as part of our RSS ingestion pipeline.
- We also improved the way we integrate quotes into articles, with a redesigned quote block layout
Right now, this is still in the testing phase. So yes, you may see strange layouts, broken embeds, duplicated content, or other glitches in some articles. That’s expected for the moment.
If you spot anything broken, please use the report feature on the site. Those reports go directly to our dev team and help us fix issues faster. We’ll keep improving it.
And as always: this isn’t some off-the-shelf plugin we clicked together in five minutes. This system is custom-built for our infrastructure, our scale, and our goals. There isn’t really anything else like it.
By the way, we also added direct links to the external content, but that comes with a sanitary warning.
– S.