Archive org - actually useful!

Normally I find archive.org something of a curiosity - it’s fun to see how sites looked years ago, but aside from that, not much use?

Or so I thought.

Recently I’ve figured on setting up a few blogs outside of commercial niches, just to document my personal interests as I see them.

I’m always reading up on events in the Middle East, so this week started Middle East Watch - where I can document those stories that get my attention the most.

However, a couple of years back I’d set up a blog called Extinction Watch - to document news on extinctions in the natural world as they’re reported.

It always promised to be a potentially very strong and poignant site - but then I suddenly had two new clients come aboard who covered about 30-40% of my turnover immediately, so I had to re-orientate much of what I was doing to cater for them.

Anyway, a few years later and both are still going great, but I wanted to revisit Extinction Watch - only it’s been down about a year and the original database lost. Sure, there were only a couple of posts on there, but it would have been nice to get them.

So today I finally set up a basic Wordpress install (again) on the domain after repointing it last week - then headed over to archive.org to look to see if a copy actually existed.

And it did!

So tonight I’ve recovered the handful of original posts made at the end of 2004 through a simple copy/paste, and can now start blogging again on the site - on a topic that interests me personally, not commercially.

What’s also very nice is that even though New Scientist has since restructured, their redirects are still in place so I could link to the new URLs for these. I don;t know who did the SEO with New Scientist, but it’s a pretty good piece of SEO by the looks. :)