What, you thought I was just blowing hot air? For all its *ahem* foibles, Velonews.com is one of the oldest and richest cycling resources on the Internet. The Wayback Machine has snapshots dating from late 1997, and the current incarnation of the site contains at least a few stories that are over a decade old.
However, the interceding years have not been kind to this article collection—buyouts, a series of redesigns, and staff cutbacks have created an accumulated dead-link problem that’s made accessing old content almost impossible. It’s not that the books are missing—it’s just that someone’s burned the card catalogue.
Because Cyclocosm likely has more dead links heading back to the Journal of Competitive Cycling than any other single website, I decided I might as well cook up a solution. When you encounter the dreaded “Not Found” page, just copy the bad Velonews URL, come to this page, and then paste it into the text box above. You should be magically transported to the content you wanted to find.
I know of a few things that won’t work—including most of the third-party video player content, so “What Game Play” remains lost to the ages it’s back! it’s down again!—but if you come across anything else that doesn’t work or find something other than what you were looking for, let me know about it. There’s a chance I could track it down manually, and the info will help me improve this solution / build a better one in the future.
IT WORKS – wow.
Plugged in the old Ask the Doctor column link i had on my page and TADA there is the content instead of a 404 page!
nice dude!
Another tip, if you come across an old link here or on a Google search you can try taking that number from the url after /article/##### and using it like this https://velonews.com/?p=##### and more often than not you’ll get the original post. During the forced migration to WordPress from Drupal I kept all the old article ids 😉
@Scott: that’s pretty much what this script does. There’s a little infrastructure around it to maybe build into some cooler things in the future, but that’s the basic mechanics of it.
That’s awesome! When we migrated VN to Drupal from a custom PHP platform, I made sure to keep all of the original ids ~0-90k. It’s kind of weird, but very cool to see that they’ve survived 🙂
Nice work on the url translator!
Right after the move I had them implement a redirect for /article/##### to /?p=##### but it seems to have been dropped at some point. The old Drupal setup was a gem. The decision to migrate to WordPress was made without VN input. After the move I didn’t have near the access I originally had.
“What Game Play?” video resurrected here: https://www.twitvid.com/YI6KL
That video makes me miss the days of the old Dave Z. Coolest dude, ever.
@Neal: oh man, that is fantastic. Better than I remember.