Modeling Monday: Web pages that aren't quite dead yet

     This is something of a self serving post. Over time there have been many web sites that I've visited that had some cool reference photos or drawings that have come in handy for modeling hardware that have subsequently disappeared. This should be no surprise given the ephemeral nature of the web that was pretty self evident since I first discovered it. Fan sites were often being generated by students using their school web space and invariably all these sites would end shortly after graduation and the sys admin started clearing space on the disks. Research was also powered by those frequenting bulletin boards and alt.binaries.models.scale (and sometimes without the ".scale"). These of course were cleared on a regular basis.
     So, you saved a lot of stuff. Of course at the time before memory was cheap, you would bookmark stuff and dump it on floppies (boy, that's really dating me). Then systems crash, software changes, and stuff is eventually lost. Still, some places seemed to continue on and on, even if they weren't being updated. Then one day you take a peek and 404 comes up.  Over the years, many legacy free web space providers have merged, gone out of business, or simply phased out that part of the business and overnight the sites are gone. Thus the beauty of the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) which since about 1996 has been collecting pages off the web on a regular basis. So, if you have the URL of the page you want,  you can plug it into their "Wayback" machine and see if they actually got stuff. Alas, just because it existed doesn't mean they have it. Initially the collection focused on text content, images and other file formats later so sometimes you hit the site to see "close up of hatch" and see nothing. The other problem  may be the "robots.txt" file which directs web collection software to not cache the site. I recall this as being the problem of one excellent Space 1999 site whose author was upset about large scale downloading from his site. Another problem is that you have to know the URL because there is no keyword search on the archives data (not directly, although it is possible to Google it with a site restriction to the archive domain, but I suspect this is rather patchy and dependent on external links to that data).
     So the self serving part of the post is this: How do I keep track of references to archived URLs that show up on the web and discussions groups in addition to just saving it to myself? Well, why not post it. For instance:

• Hangar 18 models used to have good reference shots of Space 1999 and The Black Hole until they stopped. (originally http://www.coldnorth.com/hangar-18-models/resources/)
• Dannysoar's fantasy site and his home page for neat articles about some fantastical flying machines (and also weird free flyers). (originally centered around http://home.att.net/~dannysoar although you have to hunt around off the links a bit as he added accounts as he ran out of space)
• The Modeler's Reference Vault which seems to have disappeared just this year (2010, formerly www.cloudster.com)
• The Idic Page which had tons of Star Trek photos and stories (members.aol.com/idicpage/main.html).
• The Lost Plan-It which was an early web page with reference shots to some of the rarer stuff like Dark Star, Valley Forge, and the Robinson Crusoe on Mars ship (www.execpc.com/~ppavlovi/lostplanit001.htm). The site is somewhat difficult to navigate and varied over time due to space restrictions
• Precision Paper Models which was one of the first places I found cool card models (www76.pair.com/tjohnson/ppsm.html). Not everything was archived. Some versions of the Atlas booster are missing, but can be made up from other Atlas versions that are archived.
• E. te Groen's models for the Philippus Lansbergen Observatory website are here. E. te Groen is still active and they may re-appear here or elsewhere.  (orig. www.lansbergen.net/eng/index.htm)

The other thing to try is just using the internet archive to go backwards in time with any of your old (or existing) links pages, such as www.spacestation42.com for card models or www.starshipmodeler.com, or even Yahoo.

The funny thing is this started fortuitously as a result of the ongoing search for those "easy" paper kits. There was a great beginner site called "Modular Space Toys" which consisted of a series of "module" models that could be combined with others to create a large variety of different models. Well, the site disappeared (it may come back), but for now the bulk of the module's are still available at http://web.archive.org/web/%2A/http://www.geocities.com/codex34/paper/paper1.html. These are great for downloading and re-painting as many of them are "gif" files and easy to edit on almost any picture editing software.

It isn't perfect. The archive is made up donated equipment run by volunteers. It often has retrieval problems and probably suffers from a non-trivial amount of memory loss, but hey, it's not dead yet!

p.s. If anyone knows if any cool archived site, or previous urls for the site (sometimes sites with a domain like "coolsf.com" may have had a previous existance as "www.geocities.com/user4/coolsf.htm") feel free to add the info below