I made a thing!
Hey all, I've been a bit quiet on here and all social media of late and been working on a project. No marketing or spam intended, but wanted to share it with you guys. I mainly built it for myself and I can't wait to explore it tonight, but its a site that showcases defunct websites and gives some detail on what it was and what it had. I appreciate any feedback and I hope you have fun going through them as much as I had putting it together :)
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Comments
Well done, this is really interesting and may i say original. Like Jing wanted to check my old "dead" websites to see what's up, a search will be a good addition.
Thanks for the feedback KinQuro and I appreciate you taking a look :). I am currently going over all the missing data and getting that sorted and once done, next up is the search and submission functions. So hopefully those will get rolled out in a couple of days between my day job haha :D
Can't wait..keep us updated!
OK final update on this post specifically and I appreciate all your kind words on this and hope you have enjoyed browsing the site as much as I have haha. I have added additional dossiers to the site so we have about 400 now and also released the submission form. So if you have a site you want to see dug up from the archives, just hit the submit link and I'll put it in the queue! And report any bugs you see here or via the about page on the site :).Thanks again everyone and enjoy your Saturday!
Hey Brad, what a fun project. It's definitely not spam, thank you for sharing!
A few thoughts and ideas I have
- I personally find the text a bit small, but this could be personal opinion/preference.
- An OG:image would improve shareability on social
Honestly, that's it lol. I love the idea and project.
I think users on oddsrabbit would love it too, I'll feature this in the newsletter tomorrow.
Oh, also a few of the visual snapshots seem to be down but that's probably a source issue
Ohh, if there was a way for users to search for a domain, that would be very cool. I had a random thought to search for some of my old "dead" domains to see what shows up lol
Great idea. I'll put that on the roadmap for when I do submissions as well so if you don't find what you are looking for, it can be submitted and I'll get it in there :)
Good spot, I knew there were a few with missing data that I am working through to collect, but looks like more than I thought. I am making a secondary pass as well to catch any missing data if available so that should be resolved in the next day or two :). Thanks for the feedback dude!
Oh awesome, thanks dude! Yeah, I'll need to work with the text a bit so good call on that one. It's in my notes now :D. I wasn't aware of what an OG:image was but after looking, I agree, I'll see what I can do haha. Thanks Jing!
OK, I've adjusted the text sizes and added the OG image so let me know what you guys think! I appreciate the feedback so far, truly :)
I though this was really cool, but then the first dossier I opened was jewwatch which seemed quite.... anti-Semitic. And without any commentary or anything besides a list of headlines for it I didn't really know what to think. Is the website randomly sourcing from Wayback Machine or is it a curated list?
Looking at the history of the site, it looks like it was at one time a collection of Jewish works but was then converted into a hate site. Thanks for spotting that Snowpire, it will remain removed!
OH wow, yeah thats not on purpose at all and I'm so sorry for that. This was initial data from a list from Wikidata and I had no idea something like that would get in there. Removing that right now and thanks for the heads up and again my sincere apologizes.
Oh, I see. Well, that happens sometimes. The rest of the site looks great though and a very nice project!
Thank you so much for bringing it to my attention. After reviewing the site in more detail, it definitely doesn't belong on the list and as much as I tried to curate the query to not include those things, it seems that one slipped through. I have also added a disclaimer to the about page so definitely let me know if you find any more. I want to include as much of the dead internet as I can, but I don't want to highlight overly hateful stuff either so thanks again for visiting :)
And I totally forgot to say thank you for the kind words haha. My brain is a bit all over the place as I wasn't expecting much traction yet so I'm all excited haha. Thanks Snowpire!
I FOUND SWEDISH CNN!!! https://digitaldeadletter.com/dossier?domain=cnn.passagen.se
Haha nice! I found Nigeria's number 1 market place just now and its a treat :)
https://digitaldeadletter.com/dossier?domain=www.efritin.com
I also found the Norwegian Culturnett! Oh my God. Its so fascinating to see the optimism and excitement of the early internet. Surprised to see this amount of Scandinavian content. However we probably were one of the earliest and most prolific adopters of the internet. This is actually really fun! Thank you for making it!
Edit: Norwegian comic website even!
Edit 2: and I just learned that theguywiththeglasses was taken down several years ago thanks to this site now!
That actually makes sense. In the early days of the net, if my memory serves, when DARPAnet was connecting all the universities and what not, there were a ton of Scandinavian campuses that were connected so it would follow that they also likely had some of the first websites. I'll have to see if I can find more along that line as thats a super interesting story of the net.
Also, can we admit the 90s was like a different planet haha
https://digitaldeadletter.com/dossier?domain=www.gurl.com
OK, I've got it populated with much more data than was there previously, same sites but a more complete picture :). I am chasing a bug though where going to the next random site sometimes causes the second half of the page or so to be formatted strange but not sure if it's just me. If anyone notices it as well, let me know but I plan on chasing that down tomorrow.
I'll keep y'all updated on the new features as well and thanks so much for all your guys support! :D
🙌
Search option is live now. Still only have a bit over 150 dossiers but more will be added soon. Then submissions so will keep you guys updated :)