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  • TheBlueComet.com Website

  • Pertaining to all railroading subjects, past and present, in New Jersey
Pertaining to all railroading subjects, past and present, in New Jersey

Moderator: David

 #1167750  by glennk419
 
I know that there were several messages in the "CNJ Being Cleared From Woodmansie NORTH" thread a while back about the demise of thebluecomet.com website. I was recently advised of a service called archive.org that contains a "Wayback Machine" which has archives of old websites. I tried it this morning, taking a "snapshot" from June 10, 2006 http://web.archive.org/web/200606101910 ... comet.com/ and amazingly, the BlueComet website is there. While maybe not totally inclusive, a very significant portion of the website can once again be viewed. I only know the original site owner as "Bob" from these pages but this may be a great way to recover the site, one which many of us enjoyed and learned from.

Has anyone else seen this?
 #1167789  by peconicstation
 
Thanks for the tip, I was able to navigate the CNJ pages, and most of the pictures loaded.

This site has some of the best pictures of the Bayonne Scoot trains, and the Southern line.

Ken
 #1167790  by glennk419
 
If you jump around to the different dates, some of the "snapshots" seem to have collected more images than others. Also found that some are just thumbnails, some are the full images.
Hope this may aid in the recreation of the site at some point.
 #1167805  by Schmatzy
 
Glenn,
Thanks for the detective work! Great to see this invaluable collection made available, or, better yet "retreived". Perhaps its the first step on the way to restoration.

Gives us CNJ pineys somewhere to go while we wait for something to happen to report on for the Woodmansie thread. Some of us have shifted attention to monitoring progress on the former CNJ branch now Barnegat Branch rail trail, likely now to suffer from the loss of county tax revenue washed into Barnegat Bay.
 #1167894  by carajul
 
Why did Mr. Staples take that web site down? It was awesome! I hope he puts it back up. I enjoyed the updates for many years. Then one day pooof it was just gone.
 #1167994  by RailsEast
 
I believe the site was 'taken down' by a problem with the web host company; the owner never intended it to go away. That's one of the problems with the internet...a site owner is always dependent upon a host to present their site properly on the world wide web; one major problem on either end relegates it to the recycle bin.....
Chris
 #1168052  by carajul
 
Ok so the owner of the site gets a hosting account with GoDaddy for $3/month and re-uploads the web site. What the heck is so hard about that!?
 #1168090  by glennk419
 
Having done some website admin work myself, creating and maintaining a website is not as easy as it might seem. If you dig through the CNJ Woodmansie thread, Bob explained some of the issues that he was facing including images being on different servers, backups etc. Website backups are many times also held by the hosting company to protect against the loss of a specific server but if the hosting company goes away, so does all of the content.
 #1169554  by GSC
 
My personal author website that I use for selling my books was hosted (a freebie) by MSOffice. I bought my domain name thru them. They closed the free hosting and I couldn't get access to my domain. I can get hold of it again once it comes up for renewal, but until then, I use wix.com for a new site. I did manage to copy all pages of content, so it isn't a total loss, and I'll live with the wix site for now. But the blue comet site was massive, so I can understand the problems in getting it all up and running again.

wix.com isn't so bad if you want a light-duty website. Easy to work with. And free.

If I'm allowed to show my site, here it is: http://www.crawsat.wix.com/garyscrawford

(If this isn't allowed, PM me and I'll take it down)