Web Archives

After a long spell of absence, during which I have been alternately unwell, away from London, busy and finally un-creative [that’s the sign that I am getting back on writing mode!], I thought of updating this blog again.

The reason is the discovery of http://web.archive.org/. Well, you could have known about it already, but I did not – and being able to see sites which are long gone, was nostalgic and memorable.

For those who have never visited this before, it may be a great experience in power of the internet. This site archives pages / sites [and changes in them] over years, and you can actually go back many years and see how things evolved for your favourite site.

For example, the first site I tried on was http://www.netprotraining.com/, a company I ran in 1999 – 2000, but then it folded and the domain name has been taken by somebody else. And, to my surprise, it spawned up not just one version, but monthly versions – between mid-2000 and 2001 [by the time I left the company]!

And, for those of you who were with me in our 'Home of Bengalees the world over' project, http://www.bengalee.com/, to your surprise, you will find the copies of the site still, though I could not get the fonts work on my computer. But it still felt great to revisit the site we were so passionate about, and spend a moment for those times when we knew how to be passionate about work.

Just imagine, there must be billions of pages, archived monthly, and kept for the posterity. I know of a project in West Bengal which is trying to create a Time Capsule – capturing the tit-bits of the current society and burying it deep in the ground in the hills of Bankura – to ensure that posterity has a chance to see how enlightened [or how stupid] we were. But, I am sure I meet one of the project team members next time, I am going to point them to this site, where so much of a dynamic web of human history for last 10 years is recorded.

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