I tried contacting him about a year or so ago, offering to help with info on the site, validating links, etc. Never heard back from him.
I run the twitter feed for my club - I could maybe reach out to him that way. Would be great if he would dump all of the info he has and we could light it up elsewhere.
Sent him a note, and also checked the WHOIS database. The domain was updated mid-August, so it would seem that carrying it forward was planned. Maybe it's literally just an issue with the site as of right now.
Maybe we should just presume it isn't coming back and try and grab all the cached content out there that we can. I can put it together into a new site somewhere.
I'm currently downloading the entire contents of the web site off of the Web Archive. We can stand up a whole new instance of the content somewhere once I have everything and can re-code the content. Maybe we can even update the content to include machines newer than 2005 and even add user photos of "unadulterated" machines.
For me, it turned out to be really easy to copy it out of the archive. Now, whether or not it will "run" as web content, I don't yet know. I'm going to publish to a web server I have running in the house and see what happens.
Gonna be a bit of a PITA, but the specs appear to be all there.
The site was originally built using ColdFusion. I'll have to see if there's a "converter" out there that will change things around to simpler HTML. Otherwise, I've got a fair amount of work ahead of me to republish all of this content.
So, it seems that the -content- is all in tact, but none of the photos are there. That in and of itself will be an area that will require a lot of work to collect all of those pictures from somewhere.
So, here's what I'm thinking... We can make this a community project. First phase will be to extract all of the data / specs for every sled that was represented on that site and push it to a new site. Second phase will be to add photos for the sleds that are there. Third phase will be to add the newer sleds that are not currently represented there. Phases II and III would run in parallel.
Will definitely take some time. Anyone truly up to the challenge?
And, for what it's worth, it has apparently been down for A WHILE. Found some other threads discussing it and noticing it back at the beginning of summer.
Irritating that the guy won't even respond to anyone that would like to help.
Yeah. I can do it. It's going to take time to do, though.
I need to figure out what I want to use for a site design, how I want to store the tech data, need to get photos of the machines, and find a place to publish all of it.
If it gets done as a community project, it could be like WikiPedia.
I'll do what I can to collect photos and such. I found his Facebook page too, but he hasn't been on it in a year or so. His wife posted on her's in August. Nothing on either of them saying something tragic. He does look like he has his hand full with 3 kids. Amazing what you can dig up on people through social media.
I've been trying to gather information on older skidoos as well, not that easy. The BRP website goes back a few years, but nothing from the 80's or earlier except specific machines in the history.
vintagesnow.com has a lot of reasonably decent stuff for older Polaris machines. I've never looked to see what they have for other manufacturers, but maybe there's some info there?
I've wondered if a single site, for ALL of the manufacturers, would really be feasible... Hmmm....
I've started breaking down the pages a bit and sorting them into directories by year. I've also started deleting out "junk" that got downloaded along with the tech specs (which, it seems, is REALLY what we're after).
I have a Polaris belt guide that I think I will try and integrate in as a technical spec item as well, and maybe we could also gather information on the default plugs as well. Would it be useful to provide default jet sizes for the carb'ed machines?
What other details are commonly sought? Track size information? I think that the whole entire site is going to end up with a pretty unique look and feel to it.
Track size is a great idea. Maybe jetting, clutch weights, plug info.....
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