The web is wonderful all right, but it’s also a pretty volatile place unfortunately. How many times have you bookmarked a site or a page, only to return later on and find that it has gone or been significantly altered? The problem is, there’s no guarantee that the page you left is the one you’ll return to, and while we can capture pages to our local computers, that gets unwieldy real fast.

Enter Mummify.it, which is a new service which lets you grab and store a web page for permanent record on their online servers. This is a very efficient way of doing things, and goes one step beyond mere bookmarking because the whole page is stored with all the content intact.

There are two ways to use the system. First you can simply add in a URL and get the system to cache and store the page. Once it’s been captured, the short link you’re given (e.g. https://www.mummify.it/B7H7CC27 ) will point to the original page. However if the page changes or disappears the link will then point to a cached version of the original page, so you get to see it as it was in the beginning. Nice.

You can also grab pages directly into your own account and dashboard, using a bookmarklet in your web browser, which makes it very easy to use. Just visit the page, click the bookmarklet and the page is saved completely. Your very own Wayback Machine for specific pages you choose.

The service is free for up to 10 mummies (geddit?) a month, $10 for 50 mummies a month and $15 for 50 mummies a month, along with advanced analytics. Our only concern would be that being a commercial venture, and not open source, this service could also ‘disappear’ and if you’re relying on it to store important pages, you’re done like a kipper.

It’s a problem the company needs to address clearly (maybe a guaranteed handover to open source or something if they go bust) if they’re going to get large numbers of people to trust them. Anyway, we like the idea a lot, and hope it grows and flourishes as more people learn about it.