OpalCat (Katherine, but I’ll call her OpalCat here) was one of my closest friends. I met her here on the SDMB in the early 2000’s. She tragically died on March 11, 2013.
Those that knew her knew how talented she was with web design. He had her own website and it was really cool. The tagline was “OpalCat’s World Domination Headquarters.” That says a lot about her personality. (She also invented "virtual bubblewrap, where you could spend your free time popping bubblewrap.)
Every now and again after her death I would go visit her site, reading her old blog posts and looking at photo albums. She had so many photos, and they were good memories. Photos of her friends, family, vacations, parties, and most importantly, photos of SDMB get-togethers!
Well, all of that is gone now. Her mother has set OpalCat’s personal site to REDIRECT to the mother’s own business site. OpalCat’s site was OpalCat.com (duh) and if you can now click that link if you need a lawyer.
I’m mad that this main part or OpaCat’s online footprint is gone forever. It should have remained up as a memorial site for her friends and family (especially her son, who is grown now).
If you didn’t know her, OpalCat was a VERY unique person. She was a great artist. She loved all things Goth. She loved to dance. She loved cats. She was a juggler. She was so much fun and I miss her.
I didn’t know her but I have a few thoughts on why her mom might do that.
So no on else gets the site once it’s released from non-payment and then puts something on it like, “Opalcat is dumb.”
If you were looking for a lawyer you probably wouldn’t just click on some random website named Opalcat. Of course her mom’s website is just her last name and not obviously a lawyer’s site so that doesn’t really help this point.
Maybe her mom has all of Opalcat’s online stuff hidden somehow that we can’t see but she could still access. I don’t know websites so not sure how to do that.
All of those are legitimate. However, other family such as her ex-husband (who she was good friends with), should have been allowed to step in to take over the site for archival purposes. I think it was kind of a dick more for the mom (with whom she did not have the greatest relationship) to just discard the site and put her own site there.
I would have gladly paid for a few or 10 years worth of URL registration, if I knew that was the only issue is keeping the URL up-to-date.
Whether the mom has the files but they’re just hidden, well that’s a dick move, because OpalCat had A LOT of online friends and acquaintances who visited her site. I guess she was kind of an “internet personally” before the days of Instagram, etc. Heck she made quite a lot of money of some of her sites.
I have my own web site. There are a couple of layers here. First, it appears that Opal’s mom must be maintaining the registration of the domain name, or it would not even redirect. You would just get a “this page available” or nothing. Second, it appears that the site is also still being hosted. Rather than doing a redirect at the DNS level, there is a redirect HTML file. I spot checked a couple of the files on the site based on the wayback link you posted, and they all seem to redirect, so the content is probably deleted from the hosting server. I get an error trying the index.php file, which refers you to “the server administrator at webmaster@opalcat.haralambie.com.” It could have been backed up someplace–that would be industry best practice–but there is no way to tell. If so it could be restored to another web site, but getting hold of it will be the challenge. A tribute site could be created–it could be painstakingly pieced together from what you can scrape from the wayback archive but you noted that there are broken links.
The only thing I know about Opal is the ongoing gag about list items.
He is the ex I referenced above. I am really wondering why he would have let this regress to her mother. She had a really good relationship with her ex, but not really so with her mother. Either way, it’s disappointing.
Katherine (OpalCat) was an artistic genius and understood websites etc. I, her mother, am a lawyer who is neither artistic nor a web guru. I honor my daughter’s websites and have paid to keep her domains under control for her son. There have been broken links in the virtual bubblewrap website that I don’t know how to fix (I don’t know what “deprecated” means or how to update it; she used proprietary things that I can’t find anyone else who knows how to do them). Katherine designed my website, and the guy I hired to help me be able to update it tried to look at the bubble wrap site but couldn’t fix it either. I believe that we have downloaded the OpalCat.com content to external drive, but there were issues with it as well. KatherineHowardArtist.com is still up, but I can’t figure out how to fix the links that aren’t working. I, too, would like to go to the OpalCat site and read and view what is there and let be around for the people who followed and interacted with her. This is not some power grab on my part–it is a 70 year old lady who relied on her daughter to know how to do web stuff. [And I certainly am not looking for legal clients from people looking for opal Cat–but that does give people a contact place.) Katherine’s ex- sold the fathom site that used to host Katherine’s (and my) web sites, and he doesn’t have access to her website content.
So if there are people on here who can be vetted and know how to return Katherine’s website to a functioning though static site, I am more than happy to help restore it. In the mean time, I am protecting her intellectual property so that nobody else can use the domain name and impersonate her.
Her Facebook Page is still there in memorial status.
I have control over all of Katherine’s intellectual property for the benefit of her son, who is not up to running any of it himself. But he knows it is all there for him when he is ready. He was also getting the Google Ads payments from the bubble wrap site until it stopped working. The money from any purchases on her FineArtsAmerica page are directly deposited from them into his bank account.
Rob and I also had a good relationship, and we discussed everything after Katherine died. I would have been thrilled had he wanted to maintain her web sites himself. He did not. (Katherine and I resumed a very close relationship well before she died.)
No dick move here. Her ex-husband did not want to do anything with her web site, which I would have loved. I didn’t discard her site and didn’t put my site “there.”
I had the hugest internet crush on Opal back in the day (it was completely one-way, for the record), and the news of her death was very sad for me. One of my goals once I win the lottery was always to buy one of her works.
Welcome to the SDMB, Opalsmom, I hope you stick around. I still buy lottery tickets.
@OpalsMom: I am genuinely sorry for the misunderstanding. I understand the grief and the desire to preserve very well.
For the record, the better thing to have your web person do would be to have them either (a) leave up the broken site or at least (b) have the URL redirect to a page showing a message about how the site is broken and needs fixed. Redirecting it to a different site makes it look like the site is gone.
I do suspect there are people here who could help figure things out. I would offer my own services, but I am only self-trained and lack experience. I’m sure there are posters here who could do a better job, and will be easier to verify.
I will say I wonder if the Bubble popper ran in Flash. If so, there’s a project called Ruffle that might be able to bring it back to life again.
Thanks. Yes, the Bubble Wrap site ran in flash, which I understand isn’t supported any more. My web person isn’t in the business anymore, so he isn’t even helping me with things on my website which I can’t do. (It is now in WordPress, so I have learned how to do the things that mostly need to be updated.) Maybe some knowledgeable posters will want to figure things out.
Nothing about the original OP title was untrue. “ OpalCat’s mother has taken over OpalCat’s website and replaced it with her own business site. Bummer ”
You go to OpalCat’s site and it redirects to her mom’s legal site. Some tech person did that. Her mom admits it was her. She got someone to do it. She could have left it alone in perpetuity. Katherine’s first husband —a tech guy— would have probably kept it up and not let it die. Her second husband, a podiatrist, probably could not have cared less. Mrs. Opal’s mom could have kept it alive. Maybe someone here can help her do that?