2020-08-13-Old-versions-of-acdw-net

Old versions of acdw.net

inspired by "The Individual Archivist and Ghosts of Gophers Past," by solderpunk

Since NQ2 has been no match for my voracious reading appetite

(see also solderpunk's pikkulog for discussion on that,

a longer article on expanding on the subject,

and my missive that started it all)

, I've been poking around in gopherspace with elpher, since it's really meant for that anyway. I like the underground! It's nice. The people there all seem pretty cool, tbh.

ANYWAY, solderpunk's article I linked at the beginning of this post, "The Individual Archivist and Ghosts of Gophers Past," got me thinking about my personal domain

acdw.net

-- I thought I'd look into the Wayback Machine to see what it was back before I even had it (I think I bought it around 2018 or so).

Oh the Wayback Machine, acdw.net has 48 captures. The oldest is from

07 Feb 2002

and is apparently the website for an independent Spanish-speaking designer, Aurelio Córdova Diseños. Here's a google translation of the text on the front page:

> ACDW, is the acronym for the independent designer Aurelio Córdova Diseños Web, who greets you.

>> Let me provide you with advice, and help you build your project on the WEB. The country and the world deserve to hear from you, your company, your products and services.

> At ACDW.NET, we have an appropriate plan for each project and budget. In this way we contribute to making the WEB a virtual place where we are all present.

It looks the same until

31 Jul 2003,

when it turns into a black page (possibly a missing image?) with two links, to a "Version HTML" and a "Version ASCII." I clicked on "Version HTML" and found a page titled

Estamos en remodelación.

I guess they were remodeling the page?

After 2004, it looks like it was a mish-mash of Nginx errors, Cannot-be-founds, parking pages, and the like (in German, Chinese, and English!), until I bought the site in 2018.

Here's the first capture of *my* site, in an early iteration.

Of course, it's missing a lot of the CSS and images, but the content's there, in all its glory. There's not too many captures of the old versions of my site, though, and none of the newest version.

Things I've learned from this

I was pretty lucky to be able to buy the site when I did. It wasn't being squatted or used by anyone, so I got it for a good deal. Which means, I guess, regular market price. The Web is weird.

I should put up more of my old content for posterity's sake. Maybe a 301-to-404 thing? If I can figure that out. I might have to switch webhosts to make that work, to be honest. I did read an article somewhere talking about doing that for personal sites -- basically if a page doesn't exist, you 301 the path to an archived older version of the site, all the way down until at the oldest version, if it still doesn't exist, you hit a 404. I thought it was a neat idea.

The WayBack Machine is *really* cool, if sort of weird to navigate.

Thoughts about Archiving Gopher/Geminispace

I like solderpunk's idea. I like that idea a lot. It'd be cool to build a feature in a gemini client -- I could do it in bollux, but I don't use it anymore, honestly; maybe in elpher -- to automatically save every page visited in a folder, for later retrieval. It could be configurable if it'd be used as a cache or just dump, and whether to over-write files or save them with date of access, or something. And then it'd be a cache of text files on your computer that you could just grep or index or whatever. Like keeping books on your bookshelf. It'd be nice.

Why this isn't *on* acdw.net

My webhost (nearlyfreespeech.net) doesn't allow traffic except over ports 80 and 443. I'm seriously considering switching hosts for this alone. I have breadpunk.club's VM over on Digital Ocean, and have been thinking about using part of it for acdw.net -- though I don't know how to even do that, haha. Suggestions welcome, I guess.

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Copyright (c) 2019-2020 Case Duckworth. CC-BY-SA.

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