Content resurrection

Last night I was viewing traffic data relating to a few of my sites on alexa.com. As I was clicking around I saw the “See how jamescaws.co.uk looked in the past” option. It was exactly at this point that my trip down memory lane began, even before I clicked the link.

The Internet Archive WaybackMachine is a site I haven’t used in a couple of years. I’m quite a sentimental person and there’s nothing I like doing more (sometimes) than reminiscing, even more so when it comes to things like photos - and now it would seem with websites too. I headed on over there and was somewhat pleased to find archives of this site from “as far back” as 2002. OK, little over 6 years ago, but the web is a rapidly evolving world you know!

Sadly, not all of the images have been archived, so some of the pages look a little different to how they did at the time, but nonetheless it is possible to get a good idea of what the site consisted of.

I’ve never really considered my self a blogger. In the early days I would keep my site updated with what I was up to in life purely for the benefit of friends and family, but having viewed my site as it appeared back in 2002, I’m half inclined to refer to myself as one of the pioneers of theblogosphere. Well maybe not, it would appear I was perhaps a few years too late according to Wikipedia.

Any how, whilst viewing one of my early sites I came across a few articles I wrote or reproduced. One such set of stories related to my Grandad’s escape from Nazi occupied France during the second world war. On reading through them again, I can’t understand why I ever took them down from the web, they are so interesting. I understand for a period of a year or two I stream lined my site into a handful of pages, but I should have left the escape stories up.

So, thanks in part to the WaybackMachine for prompting me and the fact I rarely get rid of files once they bed in on my hard disk, I have resurrected the story of Warrant Officer Brian Bilton’s escape from France during World War II for all to read, plus a few photos that were taken around 20 years later.

There are a couple of other items I had on my site around the same time. I may consider resurrecting those as well, but that’s adecision that can wait for the immediate future.

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