The new free software tool named Amber is designed to help bloggers and website owners prevent broken links by taking a snapshot of content on every linked page. 

Released by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Amber is available as a plugin for WordPress and a module for Drupal. News outlets, fact-checking organizations, journalists, researchers, and independent bloggers will find the new tool useful.

“The Web’s decentralization is one of its strongest features,” said Jonathan Zittrain, Faculty Chair of the Berkman Center and George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School, in a statement. “But it also means that attempting to follow a link might not work for any number of reasons."

"Amber harnesses the distributed resources of the Web to safeguard it. By allowing a form of mutual assistance among Web sites, we can together ensure that information placed online can remain there, even amidst denial of service attacks or broad-based attempts at censorship,” Zittrain said.

A video on Amber provides a quick overview of how the tool works. The free downloads can be found on the Amber site. The new tool is the result of a multi-year research effort by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department.