These have an archive of it apparently, but offline:

https://archives.museumofplay.org/repositorie … /3/resources/43

The recruiting giants presentation is easy enough to obtain but the rest will rely on someone having mirrored the site locally.

The web is horribly transient, even sites that still remain could have been rebuilt several times over and old content not migrated… that’s why these days I prefer to save a local copy or mirror the site/page myself because you just can’t count on it to still be around in a few years time.

Although having said that, seems you can still download ~8.5GB of the raw web archive for the site here:

https://archive.org/download/warc_www_alexstj … com-WP_20170612

Yep, not quite as purged as he thought 😁

Attached opened with WebRecorder.

hornet1990 wrote on 2024-07-29, 15:21:

Although having said that, seems you can still download ~8.5GB of the raw web archive for the site here:

https://archive.org/download/warc_www_alexstj … com-WP_20170612

Better save this somewhere. I don't know archive.com's rules, but maybe he can report it and get it deleted.

I hate how it's possible to exclude publicly available sites from the wayback machine. It should not be allowed when the entire point of that site is internet information preservation.

eddman wrote on 2024-07-30, 07:46:

Better save this somewhere. I don't know archive.com's rules, but maybe he can report it and get it deleted.

I hate how it's possible to exclude publicly available sites from the wayback machine. It should not be allowed when the entire point of that site is internet information preservation.

Already have 😉

Also found an earlier version from 2016 on archive.org, and they were just what google had indexed. Presumably others exist for each snapshot, but without knowing when the snapshots were taken it’d take a bit of effort to find them.

Does seem like a very odd thing to do though, makes you wonder why…

hornet1990 wrote on 2024-07-30, 06:51:

Yep, not quite as purged as he thought 😁

Attached opened with WebRecorder.

Marvellous, thank you very much!!
May I ask you to upload somewhere the unpacked pages as a regular ZIP archive?

eddman wrote on 2024-07-30, 07:46:

Better save this somewhere. I don't know archive.com's rules, but maybe he can report it and get it deleted.

I hate how it's possible to exclude publicly available sites from the wayback machine. It should not be allowed when the entire point of that site is internet information preservation.

The worst part is that sometimes pages can suddenly disappear for no apparent reason. This happened to our old forum at doom2d.org (some of those pages are mentioned in this post). I even had emailed this list to Jason Scott (@textfiles on Twitter) a year ago, and he promised to forward it to the Wayback team (to which I sent it initially), but alas, nothing has changed.

I think it has something to do with this

https://www.wired.com/2016/04/alex-st-johns-d … ong-women-tech/

zuldan wrote on 2024-07-30, 11:48:

I think it has something to do with this

https://www.wired.com/2016/04/alex-st-johns-d … ong-women-tech/

More than likely, just the timing seems odd. If he was going to try deleting himself from the web you’d have expected it at the time of the article (8 years ago), not for at least a year later, and probably much more recently than that…

BlackDoomer wrote on 2024-07-30, 11:37:

Marvellous, thank you very much!!
May I ask you to upload somewhere the unpacked pages as a regular ZIP archive?

Dunno, first time I ever used webrecorder was this morning so I don’t know how easy it is to extract the content. I’ll have a play but no promises…

Not having much luck with this I'm afraid. None of the viewer tools (WebRecorder or its replacement ReplayWeb.page) seem to support exporting - can't even find or load the page in the latter.

Other tools I've tried for extracting the archive back to files are a mixed bag. Warcat is the most promising/successful, but crashes out whilst parsing a request header 81000 files in. It has extracted the html page though, which I've attached but it is just the html so you've got the text content, but none of the formatting or images.

The second problem is that all the URL's in the html (and css) are absolute (protocol://domain/path/to/resource) rather than relative to the sites root (/path/to/resource). Whether that is the way the archive was created or the original site built I don't know. But in order to display correctly in a browser without the original domain every single URL would need amending (the reader tools obviously intercept the request and do this on the fly).

Its an intriguing challenge which I'll continue looking at as and when time permits, but if you want to see the page (and any others) as they originally were any time soon I suggest downloading the archive and webrecorder and viewing it that way.

hornet1990 wrote on 2024-08-02, 14:04:

Its an intriguing challenge which I'll continue looking at as and when time permits, but if you want to see the page (and any others) as they originally were any time soon I suggest downloading the archive and webrecorder and viewing it that way.

Thank you very much for all this effort anyway. Will hope to see the full version.

Well after more effort than I should've put in I've got a copy of the site working and hosted on my own server at

https://rogueone.uk/mirrors/asj/www.alexstjohn.com

Search doesn't work (naturally as it's a static site) but most other parts should. I had to rewrite the categories dropdown, and the archive dropdown directed to URL's that weren't captured, so there'll you'll just see a generated page of links to content. All downloads should work too.

If you're not seeing content (such as user images by comments) then try enabling mixed-content mode in your browser. The original site was done in wordpress, and has a good mix of http and https links on each page, whilst being served over a secure connection. I could've gone through and updated all URLs to https but given that not all content is captured locally in the original archive then that could potentially cause more issues than it solves so I've left it for now.

If the site is inaccessible at any time then it's me playing with my web server config, for which I make no apologies. It'll be back up when I'm done.

Enjoy!

hornet1990 Can't find words to thank you for such an tremendous effort.

The only flaw I've noticed so far is a broken link to "Known Issue DirectX SDK (June 2010) Setup And The S1023 Error - Games For W" here:
https://rogueone.uk/mirrors/asj/www.alexstjoh … rect-downloads/
Looks like chopped up by a regular expression. May I ask you to fix it?

Found another link broken in the same manner: DirectX Foundation Backgrounder 1997(2).pdf
https://rogueone.uk/mirrors/asj/www.alexstjoh … x-time-capsule/

Yeah the regex has issues with files that have brackets in them, but it shouldn’t. Tbh I haven’t looked at that in any detail but will now. I’ve also found a few other issues with some of the external sites that were captured so I’ll tweak my code and have another crack at it.

Keep letting me know of any issues you find though.

I've replaced the site with an updated extract. This has fixed a bunch of different issues I've found, including the DirectX Foundation Backgrounder 1997(2).pdf download link you found above (regex was flawed afterall). It also gets the javascript working, which is a double edged sword because now the main landing page slideshow works, but then a couple of pages have thrown alerts... just have to play whack-a-mole with them as they arise.

I've removed a number of cached hosts that weren't displaying correctly, including youtube which now allows the embedded videos to work properly, albeit some of them are no longer public or have been deleted from youtube.

WRT the link text "Known Issue DirectX SDK (June 2010) Setup And The S1023 Error - Games For W" it's not broken. That's how it was in the original source (and the associated filename), and when I look in the downloads folder there are three files with names that are obviously truncated, and all of them are 80 characters in length so I'd guess Wordpress had an 80 char limit on uploaded filenames.

Excellent, thank you!

hornet1990 wrote on 2024-09-01, 13:52:

WRT the link text "Known Issue DirectX SDK (June 2010) Setup And The S1023 Error - Games For W" it's not broken. That's how it was in the original source (and the associated filename), and when I look in the downloads folder there are three files with names that are obviously truncated, and all of them are 80 characters in length so I'd guess Wordpress had an 80 char limit on uploaded filenames.

I know, but my complaint was about the link, not its text. It was clearly broken just like any other link with brackets.

In the original upload I had manually fixed them up on the downloads page but maybe messed up that one.

They should all be working now with that last update though (with no manual fixing), certainly are for me.

Apparently, Alex St. John has started posting his memories again, but now he does it on LinkedIn and YouTube.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexstjohn/recent-activity/all/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexstjohn/recent … ivity/articles/
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT8Diw … -Xf8GA22ggIGhBA (@PlaycastIo channel)

Here, for example, is his relatively recent story about the relationship between Microsoft and SGI regarding OpenGL:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alexstjohn_its … 936641025-6ArG/
It's quite entertaining and he shares some insights there (albeit rather controversial ones).