Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Need a fix of StopMoShorts?

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Visit one of the most powerful of all websites... the mighty Archive.Org, which periodically crawls the web and takes snapshots of existing websites to archive them for posterity. A tremendous boon for those sites which, like SMS, meet their demise for whatever reason and leave a void where they used to exist.

I clicked through on one of the tutorials just to see if it would really show up, and it did. So I don't know if the site has full functionality or not... sometimes parts of a site are archived but not others. So, some or all of the films might not be functional.

Here's a quick lesson in how to utilize the power of the Archive.org Wayback Machine.

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Type or paste in the name of the website you hope to find in the search window, then from the dropdown menu select Wayback Machine (the top option). Then click GO. If the site has been archived, you'll get a page with dates listed, and links under some of them. These are the "snapshots" of the site. You can click on any of them and see what the site looked like at that point in time. Generally the later ones are the more complete, though sometimes, as I said, only parts of the site might exist in certain versions. If you get an incomplete version of the site, try refreshing the page and give it some time, sometimes the images load slowly. Or just go in at random and try a few different dates.

This is an incredibly powerful site, and the knowledge of how to use it is invaluable. Learn it, and enrich your cyberlife. I've added a direct link to the Archive.org version of StopMoShorts to my Resources section for your convenience (as well as my own).

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow! Mike, thats fantastic! We could sart telling newbies to visit the archived site for tutorials again.

Its weird, like a shell of what it use to be. I'll be checking back

Edwound Wisent said...

(^ ooph! yer crackin' me up, em be.
(^ twere it knot for my main sigfile dpropping smack dab down into the wayback, I'd never have hinted stopmoshorts was there as well. (^ thanks for being a far better megaphonesolicitor than Eye en my whisperred mumblings.

Anonymous said...

Wohaa ! Finally. Seems to work mainly (especially the first few entries were not possible to open - but this might also be due to a bad connection...)
Yes, StopMoShorts being gone left a void. And the vacuum is still drones in my ears. But finally, something/somebody put a plug in it. Phew.

R.S.Cole said...

You saved me from some work! I needed to write a brief bio of myself for a submission form to send to a film festival. I already had one at SMS and with this nifty link you provided, I was able to retrieve it PLUS I found that my precious page in the Showcase Gallery is still intact and working!

Huge Thanks!!

Anonymous said...

Amazing discovery! I've already referred someone to some photos on SMS that weren't anywhere else.
I can't get any of the videos to play, but most of the still images and pages with text come up ok.

I continue to miss the QT frame-by-frame playback of animation, and the feeling of having a special place for stopmotion films.