3-31-17 Curlie now has a directory. Click on "collection." Still just links to DMOZtools, but at least someone's working on it.
Bible Verse of the Day: Mark 10:17-29
Old-Site of the Day: Takinagaki.com Online resume of a Japanese documentary filmmaker living in New York. Designed in 2000, it still looks good. With such a clean layout, I have the feeling it would still well work on mobile browsers if he added a meta viewport tag.
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 197; Unique 96
3-30-17 Old-Site of the Day: BDDBot Homepage Anyone want to start a search engine? This is a website for a small (100k) search engine program written in Java for a mid-90's book. The author can't work on it anymore; he signed a noncompete agreement when he worked for another search company, possibly InfoSeek. It is open source tho, so you can continue the project if you want, and for once the starting point seems small enough to wrap my head around. If you explore the site a bit you can find info on the author's other projects; he's done a lot. Here's the book, by the way. If you explore a bit from there you can find info on other old search engines.
Bible Verse of the Day: Matthew 6:30-35
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 213; Unique 111
3-29-17 Bible Verse of the Day: John 1:1-5
Old-Site of the Day: TV Classics.com I saw this address at the end of The Dick Van Dyke Show's credits; its the distributor's website. The main page has a copyright of 2003; other pages are even older. They have a link to their web designer, but it looks like the designer's gone out of business. Active websites never say "Search the Ads." (At least they didn't til now. ;)
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 113; Unique: 55
3-28-17 Old-Site of the Day: The Computer Closet A large online museum from someone's collection of old computers. Also has scans of old computer magazines, including the Popular Electronics issue that introduced the Altair! Sadly, it looks like the webmaster only made the covers avaliable. I'd really like to read that issue...
Bible Verse of the Day: Matthew 18:5-6
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 80; Unique 57
3-27-17
Bible Verse of the Day: Judges 6:14-17
3-26-17 Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 26; Unique: 13
3-25-17 How I find old websites isn't a secret; I've just done it so long it's become intuitive, & hard to explain. Old-Site of the Day: B205 History Page Ever see Irwin Allen's Lost in Space or The Time Tunnel? The computers in those shows were real, & this site has info on them. Here's someone's write-up on using one.
Bible Verse of the Day: Matthew 5:13-15
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 202; Unique: 110
3-24-17 Yesterday Melon King asked where I find "all these sites." Truth is, I don't know. Many I found in DMOZ, some were linked to by other sites, some were found with regualr web searching, others I've known of & used for a long time. A few, like badmovies.org , are still popular, & still rank well for common queries. Yesterday's site, , I found a few years ago. I was looking for old sites. I figured Googling and a free host's name would get results, & was the 1st result for " Tripod." Google's changed their ranking now; I don't think that works anymore. I found it again in DMOZ, a day or so before the site was shut down.
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 13; Unique: 13
3-23-17 Over 8,000 Unique Views! Thank You!Blble Verse of the Day: Deuteronomy: 31:1-8
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 143; Unique: 75
3-22-17 Bible Verse of the Day: Acts 2:30-40
WebSiteRing Visits for today: 213; Unique: 111
3-21-17
Bible Verse of the Day: Romans 5:1-11
WebSiteRing Visits for today: 177; Unique: 90
3-20-17 Thank you for viewing my website over the weekend. I don't know if anyone liked my DMOZ article; no one said anything. There may be some funny characters in it. Forgive me. I copied & pasted it from a word processor to a text editor, & didn't catch all the errors that caused. While no one commented on the article, a few people did comment earlier in the month, when I announced DMOZ's closure. Thanks strata, A.N. Lucas, & arkmsworld. The editors have set up a new site at curlie.org to continue the project. There are also several mirrors where it may live on. These include DMOZtools.net, curlz.org, free moz, & IWWT. You can download the last RDF dump from curlz or IWWT. The Wayback machine may have it too. I'm worried that none of these efforts will ever have any sort of prominence, that they will never get the resources they need, or that editors will continue on different services, resulting in several weak projects instead of one strong one. But worry doesn't help anyone.
Bible Verse of the Day: Matthew 6:25-34
SearchEngineLand's Danny Sullivan wrote a piece on DMOZ closing on Friday. I haven't had a chance to post a link til now. Says this is the "end of an era of humans trying to catalog the entire web." I'm still not convinced algorithms can do a better job; a faster job sure, but not better. And, technically, Google uses human editors to help them classify sites. SearchEngineLand even has an article on it. Also note that DMOZ editors used automatic tools to check for bad links. The difference is in the emphasis; Google uses automatic processes with humans to back them up; DMOZ used automatic processes to back up humans.
Old-Site of the Day: DMOZ, Archived on March 17, 2017, at 13:33:30 This is the Wayback Machine's last working crawl of the Open Directory Project. The next one is a goodbye message. I don't know what I'll do with the pages I saved. I'd love to show them to you, but I'd need to get permission; I don't want to mess up any attempt to restart the project.
WebSiteRing Visits for today: 367; Unique: 181
3-19-17 WebSiteRing Visits for today: 31; Unique: 18
3-18-17 WebSiteRing Visits for today: 17; Unique: 16
3-17-17 Three days after it's official closure, DMOZ is still up. One more chance to save what you can...
Old-Site of the Day: RefDesk.com The Drudge Report is an old site, but it's too controversial to post. Drudge's dad also has a site, RefDesk.com, which is nicer. He's linked to web resources to create a massive portal or directory. Think StartHere on overdrive. Here's what RefDesk looked like in 1996, 1998, & 1999.
Bible Verse of the Day: Psalm 23:4
DMOZ is now returning an error message. It's gone. Goodbye Mozzie; Goodbye DMOZ. )':
And now it's back. Editor pages still return an error message. :(
And the whole site's back down.
AOL/Verizon put up a link to DMOZTools. It's officially over. -_-
Been working on this since I heard the announcement. I can post it now.
WebSiteRing Visits for today: 440; Unique: 233
3-16-17 DMOZ is still up, but it's officially closed. You can still view the list of sites; you can even edit if you have an account. There's just no guarantee that anything you do from now on will be saved.
Old-Site of the Day: Skrenta.com Rich Skrenta founded DMOZ & Blekko. He last updated this blog in 2013, before Blekko was sold to IBM & shut down. Here's his about page. Quite a list of accomplishments. See that NewHoo button? It leads to his archive of DMOZ's homepage from when it was still called NewHoo! The links lead to the current version of DMOZ. Hopefully he'll change them to whatever comes next.
Bible Verse of the Day: Ecclesiastes 2:24-25
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 133; Unique: 67
3-15-17 Just checked. As of 7:30 AM, US Central Time, DMOZ is still there. Don't know how long that'll last, but it's nice. Wikipedia says it closed yesterday. Do Wikipedia's editors actually check what they publish, or is this one of those weird cases where they just can't find a cite for something that's obvious?
Old-Site of the Day: epguides.com Another old favorite of mine. This one's still regulary updated, but they've never gotten rid of their simple mid-90's layout. Epguides.com hosts episode guides for TV & Radio shows, from the late 40's til today. Actual episode summaries are usually on other sites which epguides provides a link to. They used to have their own episode summaries; they still host a few for more obscure series. They also host a current U.S. TV schedule, & links to TV theme songs & the like. Here's what epguides looked like in 1999.
Bible Verse of the Day: Psalm 5:11
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 264; Unique: 122
3-14-17 Well, today's the day DMOZ closes. It's still up, for now, so go there & try to save what you can. Some editors are trying to continue the project under a new name. I'll try to say more when I have more information.
Bible Verse of the Day: Jude 1:22-24
Old-Site of the Day: RadioShack.com, in 1996 RadioShack, the U.S. chain of electronics stores is going bankrupt again. This is the earliest version of their site, when they were owned by Tandy. Tandy's site appears to mirror RadioShack's content. Here's an interesting sounding proto-blog they hosted, tho I've not had a chance to explore it yet. Here's a picture of the Tandy building. It was hit by a tornado around 2000.Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 239; Unique: 117
3-13-17 Logged in today & saw that I've had 7000 unique views. Thank You!
Bible Verse of the Day: 1 Corinthians 9:24-28 Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 126; Unique: 57
3-12-17 Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 30; Unique: 18
3-11-17 Bible Verse of the Day: Proverbs 10:5
Then DMOZ closes 3 days later. Not a fun week for me. -_-
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 147; Unique: 73
3-10-17 Old-Site of the Day: home.mcom.com This was Mozilla's 1st website, from 1994. A few years ago someone persuaded TimeWarner/AOL to put it back up. (They planned on selling the domain.)
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 63; Unique: 38
3-9-17 Someone set up a qucik mirror of DMOZ at http://dmoztools.net/ This will let Wikipedia keep linking to DMOZ til the site can find a new long-term home (and name.)
Bible verse of the Day: Matthew 3:13-15
Finally had a chance to remove last month's updates fron the main page. They were already in the archive; I just hadn't had a spare second to remove them from the main page.
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 152; Unique: 83
3-8-17 DMOZ's data, from what I've seen, is fairly easy to read. It's just lists of categories, URLS, site titles, & descriptions. There's not much else to say so...
Old-Site of the Day: OamWeb.com This is a late 90's free host, a contemporary of Geocities, tho not as popular. You can't register anymore, but you can see a list of their user's sites. (Including people's email addresses! O_o) Nice, but it looks like most people registered, then left without making a single update. :( A search of the site brings more interesting results. I found this site in DMOZ's free hosting category...
Bible Verse of the Day: Genesis 45:1-5. Even bad events can have positive outcomes, tho we may not know it at the time.
Visit to WebSiteRing Today: 224; Unique: 102
3-7-17 Bible Verse of the Day: Hebrews 11
ref.dmoz.org/ref/ DMOZ's data's free to use, if you give them proper credit. If you try to find it with Google, you'll only find an old version. Here's the current version. There's a link to archived versions dating back to 2004. Might be good to save them all, incase someone adds a robot.txt file to the domain forcing the Wayback Machine to delete thier archived versions.
I must note that DMOZ's data dumps aren't proper RDF files; DMOZ started making them before before the format was "finalized" & the two formats "diverged." (Source: w3 Wiki) You can still read them as plain text files; you'll just need to find a program to parse them. Here's one on GitHub, tho I've not tried it. More instructions on StackOverflow. Simple Yahoo search should bring up more.
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 297; Unique: 141
3-6-17 DMOZ closes in a little over a week. Before it does, take a look at this category bookmarking most (all?) of the Mozilla images. I've always liked them, & will miss them. Even if the editors start a new directory, they probably won't be able to keep them; Mozzie's part of DMOZ's branding which is owned by AOL & probably isn't part of the Creative Commons licensed data. You may want to download a few of these. If I'm reading AOL's terms correctly you can download their content for personal use if you don't redistribute it. If you want you can download each page, saving all the graphics there. In Firefox right-click & select Save Page As; In IE goto the File menu & select Save Page As. I don't remember how to save a page in Chrome or Safari right now. You can also add each page to the Wayback Machine. (Look for the add a page box in the lower right hand corner of the page. Copy & paste the URL there, then click save. You'll have to do this for every page you want preserved.) No gurantee that AOL won't add a robot.txt file to DMOZ's domain forcing the archive to delete everything, but there's always hope, right?
Bible Verse of the Day: Philippians 4:11-13
Almost forgot, the large image of Mozzie on the 1st page isn't in the bookmarks, & you can't get it by downloading the page. Find it here: http://dmoz.org/img/mozzie-banner.png. All the Mozilla images are stored in that directory, but there hasn't been an index file for it in years. Actually, there never was; they just had Apachee automatically create one listing the directory's contents. I don't know if there are more images there which aren't listed on the Bookmarks/M/mozzie pages.
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 205; Unique: 114
3-5-17 Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 19; Unique: 11
3-4-17 Sorry for not updating yesterday. The time I usually spend on this site was spent at DMOZ, archiving things. I also found a category for sites which use their data. Master.com has a decent mirror. Master.com is also a fairly old site, dating back to about 2000. Offers tools for people to start their own portals. If it's ok with you, that's our Old-Site of the Day. (I haven't put much thought into it.) I'll have to check & see if the Wayback Machine has a decent archive of Master.com. (Just Checked. They have the main page, but not the Directory; it's blocked by a robots.txt file.)
Bible verse of the day: Proverbs 15:1-3
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 366; Unique: 162
3-3-17 Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 55; Unique: 35
3-2-17Old-Site of the Day: Gigablast.com, in 2002 Gigablast is a search engine started by a former Infoseek programer. When 1st launched some thought it could beat Google. (Remember Google was only a few years old at the time, & they had recently beaten much larger competitors.) Still online, it delivers... interesting results. Sometimes the results are more on-target than Google, other times I can't stand them. Gigablast has a mirror of DMOZ, but it's not the most recent version, and links aren't alphabetized, which makes it hard to find the right category. Still useful, considering what's happening...
Bible Verse of the Day:Psalm 3:5-6
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 134; Unique:64
