Reviving lost websites ?

I was wondering if there is a way to retrieve and restore and/or save websites that for one reason or another have gone by the wayside. One in particular was Jim Sterling's "web-birds". A search takes you to a mish-mash page of nothingness but I found on "Wayback" archive much of his old site. I have saved a few of the pictures from the site but it is a shame to lose so much great information he compiled.
Using this link: Web-Birds.Com you can access pictures of many Fighter and Bomber Groups but the main page is lost for all time I guess.
Mr. Sterling has not been able to be contacted for many years now and I fear the worst.
Any ideas?

 

Thanks Krystal, the site has been offline for a few years now and doing a search - it appears several different websites forum members have also been trying to contact Jim. Something to do with "robots . text" ? has shut it down and most of the links are now dead ends. Shame really as there were some excellent pictures and links. I'll keep looking.

 

Bumping this for later.

 

Thread pinned.

I ran a search on the domain registration for Web-Birds. Here is the pertinent info.
Expires On: April 23, 2017
Updated On: November 07, 2015
Registered On: April 22, 1997

The registrar info is hidden, but the dates makes is appear the same registrar has owned the domain all along. This might be good news if it means the Jim Sterling still has access to the domain & site. Does anyone have an contact info for Mr. Sterling? If you do, please don't post it here, rather contact me via the email in my signature.

In the meantime I'm very much considering storing the webpages from the wayback machine.

Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated.

 

Did a bit more research with no success. It has been years and with a common name not an unexpected result.

If anyone has any info on Mr Sterling, what state he lived in, where he might be today, know where he may have lived, please message me or email me via the email in my signsture below.

 

Ron, I've already started an effort to store your info. If you recall I still have a lot of your posting from early in our WW2Network/WW2Forums life.

 

On the web-birds front, I have good news, bad news, and then good news again.

The good. I spoke to Jim Sterling (aka swissy) yesterday, he is alive and well. Really nice and friendly guy, he was a pleasure to talk to. Since a few people had trouble getting a hold of him for a good while, they feared the worst, thankfully he is doing well.

The bad. According to Jim the web-birds hosting company suffered a catastrophic server crash and they lost all contents of the site. Recovery was not possible, and the site was lost.

And the good news again is that Jim was very supportive of my desire to recreate his site from the wayback machine/internet archive. A good amount of the data he created is still there, and with his permission I will try to recover & recreate as much as i am able to.

 

Great news that Jim is fine and doing well. His site had a LOT of interesting and useful information.

 

I'm willing to work with anyone, especially someone as dedicated as opanapointer. Right now I'm just measuring what our capabilities are to maintain sites, which is something that is a large commitment since by definition, that commitment is a permanent one.

I'll let the cat out of the bag a little by letting you know we (WW2Forums & WW 2Talk) are currently working on a new organization/website to store such historical records and data called the WW2 Open Resource Group. It's all driven by the same desire for historical preservation that is driving us to rescue lost websites. Once we get things sorted here, I'll start releasing that platform. Exciting stuff if I do say so myself.

 

All good suggestions. I'll need to structure this section a bit better to identify lost sites and track the progress of rescue.

The current effort with web-birds is going slow but steady. Unfortunately, we won't get the entire site, but 75% capture is realistic.

Our own galleries are still in the database, though totally unsorted. Within the next few months we are updating a few things with the forums, and the galleries will be re-opened.