This
is an addition to the original site. As with many things Bob documented
a lot of history and now this site is part of the history, it's only
fair it should get a little bit of a write up as to how we got here.
As mentioned, on the morning of the 29th of March 2025 I was having a
discussion with my father about where the old fuel lines ran. My father
grew up in Hardway amd I spent a lot of my early life there with my
Grandfather. We both came up with routes for the pipeline but they
didnt toally make sense. Mine was based on reading this site, and his
from childhood knowledge. He was adamant the pipes didnt cross to Cams
Hall and I was adamant they did. So I decided to check the oracle...
The site could not be found...
Odd, maybe it's a broadband thing. I checked when I got home and got
the same. A bit more digging found the domain was active but the DNS
servers were not, so that led to the assumption the site was having
some hosting issues. So off I trot to the Wayback Machine and I see the
last update, that bright red banner on the home page, uh-oh. My first
thought was is Bob ok? I reached out to him years back, swapped an
email or two but I dont know the guy. This site has stuffed my head
with knowledge and many an explore has been had based on it. Pre Covid
we were looking at taking on the bunkers and got a fair ways along,
information from here was used in business plans and general planning,
it cant be gone!
So an email was fired off to Bob with not much hope it would receive a
reply. A post was made on Facebook on some local groups hoping someone
might know him or know what happened, but then what?
The whole site as of it's last update, was on the Wayback Machine, so
could I get that back? I can't do anything about the domain right now,
but the .org and .uk ones are still there. My business maintains a
number of web server clusters, we have space...
So a little application called The Wayback Machine Downloader was rooted out by Hartator and as I was already working on some stuff that needed a temporary Linux VM for Loxwood Joust
so Ruby was installed and the applicaion was sent on its way. An
hour later I had a partially functioning copy of the site. Bob
used Frontpage in this sites creation which used a lot of
absolute paths, so some un-breaking was needed but a short time later I
had a fully working copy of the site.
A test copy was tried on a local Apache install and then uploaded to
one of our servers. The new domains were registered and pointed to the
server and well, you are here now.
So going forwards I'm not sure what approach to take, given this could
well be a memorial sort of affair it needs to be treated with respect
so for now I'm going to wait a while and see if anything comes to
light. It would be nice to keep the site active and growing but as it
stands that's just not possible and would mean a lot of work to move
things about, move into the Century of the Fruitbat and in a way that
respects the source. I think if nothing is heard in the next month I
may do some tidying and housekeeping just to address how the site
displays and works. Than maybe a paralell development?
Of course Bob, could come back tomorrow and tell me to take a hike, it's his material, his site and he is entitled to do that :)
If you have made it this far then I want to thank Bob, everyone that
contributed to this site and all of those that kept this site alive and
in the minds of everyone. This site has been an amazing resource and I
hope it can be kept alive for future explorers.
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