Tuesday, 11 June 2019

Blog images missing - we're bringing them back, slowly

A few years ago we alerted readers to a problem with the photo-hosting website Photobucket (PB), which had suddenly decided to start charging over £300 pa for a service which had previously been free.  

What I overlooked in moving away from PB and hosting elsewhere, was that some images on this blog were hosted there.  Not just mine, but on the slogan postmark posts especially, I have used some other people's images as shown on Stampboards.  Gradually people are deleting their images on PB and/or closing their accounts, so those images are no longer available, leaving us with a placeholder image of a fluffy kitten.  I've started replacing some of these, so bear with us while we complete the process.

UPDATE 25 April 2020
I hadn't realised how many mages on the blog had been posted on, say, Stampboards and hosted on Photobucket and relinked here.  Seemed ok at the time.  I can now say that I have been back and replaced all images in 6 years of blog posts that were not showing because of the Photobucket problem.  It's an ill Covid19 wind.


That webpage is missing - the dreaded Error 404

Ever clicked on a bookmark and found that the webpage is no longer there?  We all have.  And it can be most frustrating to know that information that we once regarded as crucial, or at least important, is no longer available to us.  There is a way round this.

So if one of our images is missing and you really want to see what it was, or if a whole webpage is missing from one of your favourite sites, you can use the Wayback Machine Web Archive -
Explore more than 362 billion web pages saved over time.

Go to this website https://web.archive.org/ and in the search box, enter the URL of the page you want to see.  In the case of our blog, enter the URL of the specific blogpost.  If the Wayback Machine has archived the page*, there will be at least one instance of an earlier example of the page.  You may find that there are many instances and one of them should show the detail you want.

* Not all sites are archived.  Some websites block robots which would otherwise archive the detail there.




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