Soomal Mirror

Soomal Mirror

Projects 2 min read

Contents

Digital preservation
Soomal.cc is a static mirror project built to keep the Soomal archive accessible. Its value is not only that an old site stays online, but that a large body of reviews and reference material remains available instead of disappearing with a legacy stack.

Archive mirror Static deployment Long-term maintenance

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Project overview

Soomal spent about 15 years building up a large collection of reviews covering audio gear, phone cameras, and consumer electronics. After the original site stopped operating, this project became a way to keep that material online rather than letting it vanish together with the old infrastructure.

What the current setup does

  • uses soomal.cc as the long-term entry point
  • runs on Oracle Cloud’s free tier and is distributed and protected through Cloudflare
  • converts the image-heavy archive to WebP, reducing the footprint from about 64GB to roughly 30GB
  • keeps the archive online first, then improves maintainability step by step

What comes next

Why keep working on thisPreserving an old site is not just nostalgia. Once many websites go offline, complete versions quickly become hard to find. The next step for this project is to move the archive toward a more maintainable static structure, improve search, reduce storage cost further, and separate content from media assets for longer-term hosting.

Project facts