I mentioned in my last post that I've been so busy recently that I had no chance of doing any treats for rarewomen. So what was going on? Well, you may recall that Yahoo! shut down GeoCities back in the fall of 2009. I guess we all knew the writing was on the wall, and it would only be a matter of time before we'd lose all of the old "free" webhosting services. The owners of FortuneCity have just gone over entirely to paid sites, closing all their old sites down on the 1st of May.

Unlike the loss of GeoCities, though, this had little or no publicity. Admittedly, they did attempt to contact the website owners by e-mail; but, of course, that would assume the addresses to be current. They also put a banner up—and, by "up", I mean up with the ads, where of course we all go looking for messages! In fact, I looked at one FortuneCity site several times in April; but, as I was interested in a text page, I had no chance of spotting any banners, since they don't appear unless there's Javascript to manifest them.

As a result, the first I knew of it all was actually after the sites had gone down, when I tried to access the same text page once again only to find it wasn't there any more. The question, of course, was...how much had we lost?

You see, after GeoCities disappeared, I did make some effort to save sites that were on the other surviving free hosts from a decade ago: i.e., FortuneCity, Tripod, and Angelfire. However, when I did a site search of FortuneCity, I found that the "google" was dominated by webpages from just a handful of large sites. Camarila's Image Galleries was a particular nuisance because it had an internal links list at the bottom of each and every page, and the mention of Forever Knight in the list was bringing up pages that had no other connection with the series at all. However, pages from Sacrosanctum: Where Vampyres Roam, Nancy's original Episode Archives (not her current KnightWatchman site), and Mr. Happy's were also turning up over and over. As a result, it was hard to find any smaller Forever Knight sites. I'd spent a lot of time on the project already; so I decided to get back to it...some other time.

I was somewhat consoled by the thought that I did have much of Mr. Happy's (though not the sound files and video clips, which had been off-site) and also the CotK faction site. However, I headed for a shower and bed with a heavy heart. Then, as I stood under the water, one little word popped into my head..."cached".

I barely waited to rinse and dry myself. Without even bothering to dress, I bolted for the computer in the hope that Google had not purged its cached pages of FortuneCity sites, as it had those of GeoCities when they'd gone down.

And I was in luck! At least some of the webpages were cached, and could therefore be saved.

Mind you, Google's cached images were reluctant to appear. Over and over, I would click on a link to find myself facing a page that was almost without graphics. I quickly realized, though, that the pictures were actually on the servers...somewhere. If I clicked on "Show Picture", then eventually they would appear. (Or, at least, most of them would appear—and I had no idea which.) So I sat there, clicking "Show Picture" over and over, sometimes for as long as a minute before, suddenly, the graphic would emerge.

After a while, I felt like a pigeon in a Skinner box. However, like the pigeon, I usually got my reward in the end.

Because Google only caches pages for a few months, I knew I had to work fast. Indeed, I occasionally found that a page I'd accessed the day before suddenly proved inaccessible. Furthermore, after about five days or so, all the graphics suddenly vanished. Though Google does still have most of the cached pages, they now have no backgrounds or pictures. I suppose someone decided to purge those files.

I'm now going through things. For some sites I have almost all the pages. On the other hand, some are missing a lot—and may well have been missing them anyway, for many of these are old sites. I have asked on FORKNI-L for help; and Desiree has turned up trumps, as she did when I was archiving the GeoCities sites. You see, she saved quite a few sites back in 2001. In particular, she had copied Mr. Happy's, and had almost all the missing files that had been linked offsite. (Back in those days, AOL was still around, so she'd been able to access them.) She had also got the sound files from the CotK site. (Google doesn't cache sound files.)

In addition, I've got most of Embracing the Knight, Lisa's Lair, Cousin Miranda's site, and the Kickstart the Knight site. I also have several little, tiny, ancient sites going back to 1997 or 1998 (and very odd some of them are).

Nancy's found her old back-up files for her original Episode Archives, and is going through them.

However, there is one site that I regret. It's one I never heard of before: Sensor's Forever Knight Site (which was at http://sensor2.fortunecity.com/FK/). It was a German site, and belonged to someone who either doesn't speak English or doesn't trust their English, for one little bit was translated for them by a friend.

Alas, I came upon it so late. I had great difficulty saving anything. (The owner had put a no-right-click thingie in the source code.) It was a very pretty site, very cleverly designed, with quite a number of nice collages.

However, thanks to Desiree, we will at least have all of Mr. Happy's and the CotK site; and we will also have most pages from several other old FortuneCity sites. When we get them into their new home, I'll post here again so that you can update your links and bookmarks.