Editing User talk:Obehrens (section)

=== The Search for the Lost Articles ===
3/4/24

I guess I'm writing another journal entry? This doesn't deserve a wiki page, but I feel like I should write about it in case anyone else wants to go on a similar adventure.

It all started when I kept noticing notes at the bottom of some wiki pages that I was copying over. They read <nowiki>**</nowiki>Taken from September 2017's #SpreadtheGolden Navigator article** (with dates ranging from 2016 to 2017.) Obviously, if I could get copies of these articles, they would be amazing sources of information on lore. So, I went to https://www.navigator.northstar-academy.org/, the current Northstar Navigator site. However, currently this website only has articles from 2021 onward. A notice has been added on the front page, saying " DUE TO TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES, SOME PREVIOUS ARTICLES WRITTEN FOR THE NORTHSTAR NAVIGATOR HAVE BEEN TAKEN DOWN. THE STAFF IS WORKING HARD TO GET THESE ARTICLES BACK UP! THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE, AND IN THE MEANTIME, PLEASE ENJOY THE ARTICLES WE HAVE AVAILABLE." (this wasn't there when I initially started my search.) However, I was not deterred that easily. The first thing I did (I think? This whole thing started a long time ago) was to search the whole website for the articles. Who knew, maybe they just weren't linked to in an obvious place. In that search, I didn't find the articles, but I did find an article on the history of the Navigator. This was super interesting, but what was most helpful was a link to the old website: https://nsastuco.wixsite.com/navigator/articles. I'm not even sure why it was put there, as that site isn't up anymore. But I'm glad it was, because this meant I could turn to my old friend, the internet archive. If you don't know what the internet archive is, it's basically a website that has archived copies of anything and everything digital. That is, anything and everything that people decide is worth archiving. It's super useful for looking at older versions of websites - you can look up a website and see all the times it's been saved. However, there's a catch - someone has to save it. Websites aren't automatically saved. So, I crossed my fingers, and entered the URL. One result. It was from Jan. 18, 2023. "Surely, this must be too late?" I thought. But when I clicked on it, the website slowly loaded, and I became almost ecstatic. I soon calmed down, though, because another catch is that each page must be saved individually. So, if you save the front page of a website, only that page is saved, not all of the sub-pages, if that makes sense? Like, for this wiki - if I saved nsa.awkik.org, that would archive the front page, but nothing else. So, I started opening every visible link on that saved page, hoping that some others were archived as well. (Recently, I discovered a feature that allows you to search for all saved pages from a certain domain, but at that point I didn't know about it.) I was really only interested in the #SpreadTheGolden articles, so I clicked around until I found a #SpreadTheGolden tag. Thankfully, someone had saved that too. (Seriously, whoever saved all those pages - thank you, from the bottom of my heart. Really. I will forever be indebted to you for this wonderful act. Ok maybe that's pushing it a bit, but still thanks XD) Back to the story. On https://nsastuco.wixsite.com/navigator/articles/tags/spreadthegolden, there were five articles listed. Which is a little strange - I'm pretty sure more than that were published. But anyway. Click, click, click, click, click. Wait for the pages to load. (the internet archive isn't exactly the fastest) Three pages loaded. Two error messages. Apparently, whoever saved a bunch of pages only saved three of the #SpreadTheGolden pages. But that's three more than I could reasonably expect to find, so I was thrilled. I quickly bookmarked these pages, and read them. They were awesome! I'm pretty sure we already have most of one in parts on the wiki, but the other two were new to me. So - yeah! I found the articles! But was I done? No, sir. I knew for certain that I hadn't found aLL of the articles yet, so the hunt was still on. It was around this point that I figured out how to search for all pages under a domain, and this is how I found 68 articles from that old website. I have them all saved to my computer, waiting to be possibly put on the wiki. Sadly, what would have been the most helpful page of all was broken. It was a page with archives of previous articles from FirstClass - but the "download" area was just a gray block, with no clickable links. https://web.archive.org/web/20230118201413/https://nsastuco.wixsite.com/navigator/blank-page-1 I even delved into the website code, in case the download links were simply hidden, but came up empty-handed.

Currently, I'm working on messaging certain people who might have copies of articles. Hopefully, either I can get copies directly, or they'll be put up on the new website. 

And... that's pretty much it. If you do have copies of old articles, or know someone who might, or even just have a hunch of where to find them, please contact me! At this point, I would almost be willing to swim to Hawaii to get the old articles ;-;

[[User:Obehrens|Obehrens]] ([[User talk:Obehrens|talk]]) 16:54, 30 August 2023 (UTC)