- What it is
- A text file you typed out containing the published addresses, each with a date and a note saying where it came from.
- How you get one
- You open an editor, copy the addresses from a source you can name, and type the date and the source next to each line.
- Where to keep it
- On storage you control, in a location you can reach without a browser, ideally with one copy that is not on the same disk.
- How it goes wrong
- It silently ages. Lines get copied forward without their dates, and a source column quietly becomes the word somewhere.
- What fails without it
- You have nothing to compare a new address against, so anything that looks roughly right will pass without argument.
- Time to acquire
- A few minutes to make the first version, and a few minutes again each time you decide it has aged out.
A file, not a bookmark
Bookmarks lose their history. The bar holds a title and a target and nothing else, so six months later you are looking at an entry with no idea when it arrived or who put it in front of you. A file has room for the parts that matter, and the parts that matter are the date and the origin.
The distinction is small and it decides everything downstream. An address in a bookmark is a thing you once trusted. An address in a dated file is a thing you trusted on a particular day for a particular reason, and both of those are checkable later. When you come back to it cold, the second one can be argued with.
What a line looks like
Three columns are enough. Adding more tends to mean you stop filling any of them in.
| Column | What goes in it | Why it earns its space |
|---|---|---|
| Address | The full string, copied rather than retyped | Retyping introduces errors you will not spot by eye |
| Date written | The day you added the line, not the day the address was published | Yours is the only date you can vouch for |
| Source | The specific place you took it from | Turns a vague memory into something you can revisit or discount |
The source column does the heavy lifting. A line sourced from a page you can name again is a line you can re-check. A line sourced from a forum post that has since gone is a line you should treat as expiring. The notes on independent sources go into what counts as a second opinion and what is just the same claim wearing a different hat.
This site publishes and does not test
The addresses on the current page are printed exactly as supplied and in the order supplied. Nothing on this site probes them. There is no status column anywhere on the site because there is no status to report, and a page that told you an address was up would be inventing the claim.
Which is precisely why your file exists. It is a record of what was published and when you saw it, and that is a real thing you can own. What it is not is a guarantee that any line in it answers. If you want to hold something closer to that, the entry on the address that worked for you covers the difference, and it deliberately lives in a separate file.
How you tell yours has gone off
- The newest date in the file is older than you expected when you guessed before opening it.
- One or more lines have no source at all, because you copied the file forward and lost the column.
- You cannot remember making the file, which means the dates in it are the only witness and you should test that witness.
- The addresses in it and the ones published now differ, and you do not know which way the change went.
What breaks without it
The failure is not dramatic. Without a file you meet a new address with nothing to hold it against, so you judge it on how it looks, and every address in this space looks equally plausible to a human eye. The judgement collapses into a shrug. You go ahead.
The knock-on lands later. When something goes wrong at the deposit stage you have no way to reconstruct which entrance you actually used, because the only trace of it was a browser tab you closed. A dated file plus a written note is the cheapest reconstruction kit there is, and it costs less than the time you spend deciding whether to make one.
Questions that come up
Should the file be encrypted?
The addresses themselves are published material, so encryption is not protecting a secret in the usual sense. What it protects is the association between you and an interest in them, which is a different problem and a real one on a shared machine. If your file lives alongside anything else you would rather not explain, put the whole lot behind one encrypted container and treat that as your writing surface for the rest of the inventory.
How often should I rewrite it?
Rewrite it when you next need it rather than on a schedule, because scheduled refreshes turn into copying the old file forward with a new date on top, which is worse than a file that is honestly old. The moment you sit down intending to use an address is the right moment to check the dates and decide whether the file still speaks for the present.
Is one source enough?
One source gets you a file. Two independent ones get you a file you can reason about, because agreement between places that do not copy each other means something, and agreement between two pages with the same origin means nothing at all. Work out which you have before you count it as confirmation.