A little web-archaeology of image files on the blog

Earlier today I happened to notice that the images were not displaying on an old post.  A little investigation revealed others.  Eventually I installed a plugin to locate broken images, and got the results.

In some cases, WordPress had decided to change the how the link was handled.  The file was “somefile.JPG”, but the WordPress link was “somefile.jpg”.  This once worked; now it does not.  I dealt with this by renaming the file extension on my PC and uploading it to the server.

There were some images which had non-ascii characters in their file name.  Once these clearly worked.  But no longer.  I dealt with this by renaming as  before.

In some cases WordPress had decided, sometime, to add “-1” to the image name in the post.  Since it did not change the image file name, that broke the display.  I went through these posts and removed the “-1”.

And then there were the external images.  Links to websites now vanished.  I was able to retrieve most of these using Archive.org, and I stored them safely locally.

It was interesting to see an image from Chris Weimer’s blog, neonostalgia.com, the site on which I originally started to blog, under  the category of “Thoughts on Antiquity”.  The domain name has changed hands several times.  The author has disappeared from the web, engaged in the far better tasks of making a living and bringing up a family.  That might have been my destiny also, had a certain young lady thought differently about me, long ago.

It was interesting to find an image from J.B.Piggin’s site, also now gone.  He was the man who opened up the Vatican LIbrary, when he discovered the vast digitisation of manuscripts which was being obscured by the then wretched Vatican website.  His weekly updates of uploads brought that collection to the millions.

But worst of all, and unfixable, was one page on the 2012 discovery of a Mithraeum at Inveresk in Scotland: the Lewisvale Roman altars.  Unusually I linked all the images to the official site.  And… the site was first moved to another address, with a 301 redirect, but the images cunningly left on the old server.  That meant that Archive.org could not archive them.  Then both sites disappeared also.  Even the writer of the diary entries, conservator Pieta Greaves, had died, aged only 46.  So there is nothing to be done.

I occasionally think that I ought not to hold local copies of material, such as Mithras images.  Ah, if only I had done so!!

Anyway, the blog has been updated, and that particular issue is done.