Broken Personal Site Revival

[moonsetterindustries]

Hello all! Mr. Midnight here, wondering if I should even bother to remake my old personal website... I did the Discord to host images thing and I had to delete that server due to friend drama. Remember kids, make your OWN personal Discord if you do that method.

It's not THAT broken, the code still works, but most of the images are dead.

 Here it is. Oi. 

I've just been working on my main project so much, and I miss having a personal one... Thoughts? Ideas?

It IS accessible via the Wayback Machine, just in pieces, and sometimes it doesn't load due to the sheer MAGNITUDE of gifs I had.

I also did not link to the OG source a lot of things... But I do now religiously!


Thoughts? Methods? Concerns?

[xero333]

The only thought I have is to not host all your images on Discord.

[wygolvillage]

I'll back this up- a little while back I heard that Discord was intending to make it so hotlinking images and files in that way would be impossible. Even if that weren't the case, i treat files and images on Discord as pretty ephemeral.

[pebble]

Yes, as mentioned above, Discord no longer allows hotlinking images. I highly recommend FileGarden as an image hosting service.

As for reviving your site, if it's something you think would be fun to do, definitely go for it!

[Melooon]

Yes yes, hosting images on Discord is a mondo major mistake - it 100% guarantees your site will be trashed and it lets Discord track your visitors! (They can see when a site loads an image from their servers  ) - Why do people do this??

Some of the older archives seem pretty intact! https://web.archive.org/web/20220425011021/https://thegalacticbucket.neocities.org/ (Also oh I remember this site!  )
There's a tool here you can use to download your wayback archives to get those gifs back on your computer.

Mini Guide:

• Install Ruby - https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
• Open a Terminal / Command Prompt
• Run: gem install wayback_machine_downloader
• Run: wayback_machine_downloader https://thegalacticbucket.neocities.org/ --all-timestamps

(This should download everything, it will take a lil while but it wont be too bad!)

So do that, then host your images on Neocities like a sane person I think you could have it fixed up in an hour

[moonsetterindustries]

Yes yes, hosting images on Discord is a mondo major mistake - it 100% guarantees your site will be trashed and it lets Discord track your visitors! (They can see when a site loads an image from their servers  ) - Why do people do this??

Some of the older archives seem pretty intact! https://web.archive.org/web/20220425011021/https://thegalacticbucket.neocities.org/ (Also oh I remember this site!  )
There's a tool here you can use to download your wayback archives to get those gifs back on your computer.

Mini Guide:

• Install Ruby - https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
• Open a Terminal / Command Prompt
• Run: gem install wayback_machine_downloader
• Run: wayback_machine_downloader https://thegalacticbucket.neocities.org/ --all-timestamps

(This should download everything, it will take a lil while but it wont be too bad!)

So do that, then host your images on Neocities like a sane person I think you could have it fixed up in an hour

A: I AM AWARE!!!! I don't do the Discord thing anymore, and I didn't know about the tracking visitors... I put them into my Neocities itself anymore, promise!

B: Holy shit you remember me? Melon, THE Neocities guy? It's an honor!

C. I DID THE THING AND THANK YOU!!! Had no idea that was a thing, thank you, truly! I was so bummed when I lost my site...

d. How do I access the files? They all downloaded, but I am unsure where to find them...

[Melooon]

How do I access the files? They all downloaded, but I am unsure where to find them...

They will have been downloaded to whatever folder your console was in when you ran the command (usually this is your User or Home folder by default, so check there!).

I am not sure how it organises snapshots (all the images might be spread out over multiple snapshot folders for example which would be annoying) - On Mac I tend to use Automator to extract all images from a folder structure when Im gathering images like this, but you could just try searching for .gif files in Windows explorer and that might work! At least you have them!

[moonsetterindustries]

They will have been downloaded to whatever folder your console was in when you ran the command (usually this is your User or Home folder by default, so check there!).

I am not sure how it organises snapshots (all the images might be spread out over multiple snapshot folders for example which would be annoying) - On Mac I tend to use Automator to extract all images from a folder structure when Im gathering images like this, but you could just try searching for .gif files in Windows explorer and that might work! At least you have them!

I have the download located, but some of the pages are symbol-heavy text gobbledygook, and the rest are sparse or just covered in broken images... Am I looking at this wrong? Opening the wrong things the wrong way?

[Melooon]

Opening the wrong things the wrong way?

Wayback snapshots are always a bit ropey - I THINK what you'll find is that its trying to combine multiple snapshots (archives of your site) into complete pages, but some of them will be broken because your site was broken - soo youve got half broken pages. (This is fine because we don't need the HTML archives, only your images are broken so we only need the images)

What I would do if I were you is something like this:

• Extract all the images from the whole download and put them all together in a folder called "images"
• Upload that images folder to your neocities storage.
• Open each page on your site in your editor of choice and do ReplaceAll - replace the Discord URL "https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/807403699969720401" with "/images/" but leave the filename intact - you might have to manually remove some numbers because discord names things weirdly, but it should be pretty quick once you get into the flow of it.

Example:
On your site the image src is "https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/807403699969720401/886702288750661652/enter-74.gif"
So replace "https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/807403699969720401" with "/images/"
You'll be left with "/images/886702288750661652/enter-74.gif"
You'll have to manually remove the number in red since I think its different for every image?
Then you'll be left with "/images/enter-74.gif" - and it should be fixed!

Im sure there are other ways to do this, but this to me seems like the most straightforward way - at the end, you'll have all your images working again and in a folder called images on your site!