Toronto, September 12, 2003. Have you ever done something dumb – and instantly regretted it? Some months back I pulled John Krug’s “Photographers of Ontario” link because I thought his site was closed. Not so. The other day John emailed me that his site was up and well after being down briefly during some work on it. I said I would restore the link and last night I proceeded to do just that. I opened the WordPress widget (text box) and in a moment of dumb-ass forgetfulness, I moved the box instead of making the browser window bigger. Poof! all my links disappeared forever as I hovered over the wrong spot on the screen – the one that says it will restore any widget dropped there to its original blank state… and dropped it. I looked at the site immediately but all links and their icons were gone.
Now, the Mac is very forgiving and I have lots of backup – iCloud, time capsule, OSX, and Super Duper. But the links are saved on our server not on my Mac. I do back up the data base nightly but does it also back up links? Don’t know.
I couldn’t even remember what links I had had. Sadly, I quit the Mac, watched some telly and went to bed (sorry to the south Asian telemarketer who called just as the links disappeared to invited me for the umpteenth time to have my ducts cleaned, and received the brunt of my annoyance with a loud crash in his ear).
As I slept, I remembered there was a web site somewhere that might have my links on file. Sure enough the web archive (which you can also see by clicking on the above icon) had last crawled our site on June 18th this past summer. I clicked on their calendar, the site opened – and there they were, my beautiful links! I saved each icon to my desktop, and opened and captured each link. I cannot praise the “Way Back Machine” enough! A great site, well executed.
Now to restore my links one by one…
