Last September, I wrote about tidying up my website and realising that a good percentage of links went precisely nowhere. It was very frustrating, realising that people I'd helped out clearly didn't feel the same way, and I lost a lot of work that I stupidly didn't have copies of, including a series of blogs I wrote for what is now called the Theakstons Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival. Don't you just love the power (and money) of commercial sponsorship?Back in the day, It was the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival and I occasionally wrote for their blog for 4 years between 2011 and 2015, figuring it gave me some exposure amongst the big boys of crime fiction. I linked my own web site to each post and only discovered these links didn't work when I was doing my housekeeping last summer. Did I have copies? Of course I didn't. Why would I need them when any reader could just go to the link ...
I tried restoring email archives, to find my original submissions, but nothing. I did find an email about a post, which got me the name of the organiser, so I emailed her to see if she had any copies, and I emailed the new admin person to see if there was a site archive - between the two of them that got me a couple of posts, but not all of them. And really, a Tortoise Crimewave sounded fascinating and I had no idea what the post had originally been about.
So I discovered the Wayback Machine. Apparently it's trawled the internet for the last gazillion years and has archived over one trillion pages. If you have urls, even if they are no longer extant, it's not particularly intuitive, but relatively straightforward to search for them, but if you have only a vague memory of a blog site that you used to write for, it's much harder. And not helped by the fact that the site went through several domain names before it bit the dust.
But noted for posterity, and the fact that it took me a good hour or more to navigate to them:
These are two different snapshots for the You're Booked blog I used to write for way back. You can see how different they are visually as the site obviously went through a revamp. at some point before it was discontinued. Not all of my blogs are available from either home page, so clearly the snapshots aren't perfect, and some of the links don't work at all, but at least they are there to be found and proof of the idea that anything posted online is available forever, even if you have to dig deep to find it.
It's an archive, so not all the links work, but at least I have rescued most of my work, including the elusive tortoise. And I have learned the hard way to keep copies of everything.
If you want to read the blogs, I extracted them all into a page on my own website for posterity. There are tortoises ...
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