Please forgive me if I missed a thread about this already, or if it should be brought up in another forum (I considered ATMB).
So, I personally have fun reading the old columns on the web, but have found that many I recall clearly cannot be located via search. Others have content missing on the website. In two cases, I have been able to recover them via the wayback machine for dopers asking about columns, and was wondering if anyone is working on a comprehensive archive of the old columns.
Oh, I’m familiar with the ‘classic’ website, and my OP was far from clear. It’s just that a few appear to be missing (although since my memory is human and fallible, I could be, you know wrong), or are missing content, like the bit in my OP post. I think that since based on my reading the Cecil’s Columns are now the lowest/second lowest in terms of activity it is probably not the best place to invest time and energy.
Turns out it is possible to do so, but would take quite a large number of hits to the server to get it. Playing around with article IDs, I was able to get articles like the one below from 1978 (pre-WWW), which doesn’t show up in the archive under Animals. So in theory, I could work my way through what appear to be sequential numbers (to a point), scraping when I get a 200 status, trying the next number when I don’t.
Two problems with that. First, I’m assuming that the articles are stored in some form of database, or at the very least, the IDs are, so if the powers that be (PTB) wanted to do this, they could do it in a few seconds or minutes. Second, continuous scraping is typically noticed by webhosts and they would likely alert the PTB who would probably be unhappy with me, and I happen to like it here.
If it turns out that the PTB have the desire to have an archive, have no way of doing so through database queries or other manner, and give me permission to scrape them for a while, I’d be happy to tackle it.