I know very little about how websites work. It’s all magic to me. So a website I was fond of disappeared a while back and I wondered if there was some sort of cache or something that stored the data that was on it.
Do I have any chance of seeing it agian? It’s not important, just a really interesting fan site about lightsabres and star wars stuff.
the site was:
www.synicon.com.au/sw/ls/sabres.htm
Sometimes, Google’s cache.
Along with NY Times articles that become pay-only once they reach 7 days old 8)
Also you could try choosing “Work Offline” from IE’s “File” menu. Then type in the website’s address and it might pull up from your cashe.
Well, here is a page from archive.org. You can probably save most of the text for your own reference from what’s contained on there, (just follow the links, they seem to work…) but you’re probably SOL on the pictures.
To give a really quick, simple explanation, think of the internet as a lot of roads, connecting places that you want to go like stores, meeting places, or the like. When you tell your web browser to go to Sears, it runs off down those roads, looks at the outside of Sears, and brings back a copy of what it sees. If you click a link within the site, it runs off down the road again, looks at, say, the men’s department, and shows you a copy of THAT. If you can’t get to a site, it might be because the road is washed out and there’s no way around it. Or it might be because the “store” has closed. There’s no way to tell easily whether it’s closed permanently, closed for a few weeks for renovations, or has moved to a location across town.
Besides google’s cache, there is a website that tries to archive old pages, http://web.archive.org/. I first saw the link to it in http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=212201”]this SDMB thread. You can go there, type in your website address, and see if they have an old copy of it.
To answer the unasked question about web pages disappearing:
A web site is nothing more (or less) than a set of computer files on one or more web servers somewhere.
A web server is some computer running some software that tells it how to give up these pages on request connected to the internet. The other key piece is the concept of “domain registration”. This means that someone has paid for the right to a website (say, “www.straightdope.com”), and registers the IP address that is associated with that web site name. That’s a set of numbers that will tell the right software that the phrase “www.straightdope.com” means “that computer, there, in the Chicago Reader’s basement, with Jerry and the hamsters next to it”.
So you type the address into your browser. It sends it to your internet server provider, sending a code that says (in essence) “give me a web page corresponding to this address”. The server looks up in the registration tables to find where to actually send that request to. (I’m leaving out all of the technical details, based on your “It’s all magic to me”, but speak up if you want more). It goes across the internet, from computer to computer, hopefully in an efficient fashion but not necessarily in a repeatable fashion, until it gets to that computer. The web server software running there goes “okay, he wants this file here”, and sends it back. (From which you can see, since I didn’t mention it, that the requests go out with your address tacked on to them, so it knows where to send the files back to.) It goes back through the computers on the internet – maybe the same route, maybe not – and back to your computer. Which then tries to interpret the resulting html, and may well say, “oh, I also need this graphic, and that one, and…”
So, you can’t get to your web site. One of these (probably) has happened:
Of course, other things could go wrong, but those are the common ones. I’m noting these because, in a couple of these examples, you could contact the person who had the website (if you can remember or look up who it was), and they might still have the files you want and be willing to send them to you. And to answer your question of “Do you have any chance of seeing it again”, in some of these cases, the owner might choose to correct the problem in time.
Hope this helps.
You could try http://www.archive.org
A search revealed these
<Sigh>. Not only did elfbabe post a shorter explanation while I was typing, but I also messed up my link. Let’s try again:
Ah, now I see what happened. I had my post saved in a Word file, in case the hamsters ate it, and Word switched my double quotes for different ones, which confused the board software. Bad smart quotes, very bad. I’m disabling you now.
Thank you all!
So what does “work offline” mean? Does my computor remember the pages it’s been to?
Yes, BMalion, it does. Though it depends on your settings. If you’ve been to it in the last couple days, it should still be there, in the original state you last visited it at.
When you visit a web page, all the data you see (text, images, etc) are stored on your computer in temporary files. This “cache” can be used if you revisit the page by using the <back> button or sometimes when you revisit the page through navigation.
You can clear out the cache and always reload the images and text directly from the website, but that takes time. It’s quicker and usually correct to just reload stuff from your cache. If the pages are dynamicly create (like the SMDB) you sometimes have to <reload> in order to get fresh information.
If you set things up correctly, you can hold onto the cache information for extended periods of time, allowing you to view a site when not connected to the Internet or if the page has gone away. Check your browser settings.
I have learnt to save any pages I really want to keep and not rely on them being available online. You can save a web page by clicking FILE - SAVE AS and then you have different formats to choose from depending on your preference.