website excavation!
Jun. 1st, 2023 08:29 amhuge huge HUGE thanks to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tempural for helping me troubleshoot the video embed coding in this!
(happy pride demon month, here's a new round of homosexuality from yours truly. i even made a new icon for the occasion <3)
the other day i had the bright idea of searching the wayback machine for "lawrence dane" - i've searched the internet archive's website on a regular basis but never thought to do a text search in the wayback machine itself, and was curious whether i might be able to find anyone else talking about him on old sites. (when i explained this to my partner they laughed and were like "no, i think you're the only one who's ever cared this much" lol.)
the first result for my search was lawrencedane.com which would have been quite the coincidence if it wasn't him - going through the site captures it became clear the domain had been taken over by spam squatters before going down entirely, so i went back to the beginning. the domain was registered in 2002, and an early crawl revealed that it had indeed likely been his personal website. but it was mainly based on flash, so i couldn't view it on a regular browser - my only confirmation was a string of text at the bottom of the broken content that read "photo gallery / credits / biography / contacts / what's new".
after some trial and error that night i got the archived captures to be functional! i tried the ruffle extension and it worked long enough to load the home page and verify it as dane's site, but refreshing the page somehow broke the extension so i had to use a portable flash-friendly version of firefox kindly shared via reddit here. that worked much more reliably and i was able to take screenshots of a 2003 crawl - and record the flash animations, lol.
( further documentation and discussion behind the cut )
tempural for helping me troubleshoot the video embed coding in this!
(happy pride demon month, here's a new round of homosexuality from yours truly. i even made a new icon for the occasion <3)
the other day i had the bright idea of searching the wayback machine for "lawrence dane" - i've searched the internet archive's website on a regular basis but never thought to do a text search in the wayback machine itself, and was curious whether i might be able to find anyone else talking about him on old sites. (when i explained this to my partner they laughed and were like "no, i think you're the only one who's ever cared this much" lol.)
the first result for my search was lawrencedane.com which would have been quite the coincidence if it wasn't him - going through the site captures it became clear the domain had been taken over by spam squatters before going down entirely, so i went back to the beginning. the domain was registered in 2002, and an early crawl revealed that it had indeed likely been his personal website. but it was mainly based on flash, so i couldn't view it on a regular browser - my only confirmation was a string of text at the bottom of the broken content that read "photo gallery / credits / biography / contacts / what's new".
after some trial and error that night i got the archived captures to be functional! i tried the ruffle extension and it worked long enough to load the home page and verify it as dane's site, but refreshing the page somehow broke the extension so i had to use a portable flash-friendly version of firefox kindly shared via reddit here. that worked much more reliably and i was able to take screenshots of a 2003 crawl - and record the flash animations, lol.
( further documentation and discussion behind the cut )
