This website has been around, in one form or other, at various URLs, since 1994. I rarely delete anything, not deliberately at least, but when transferring content from one server to another, from one content management system to the next, things go wrong. Countless numbers of broken “img src” calls litter this landscape, not because the images are gone but because this WordPress theme doesn’t like the dimensions at which the images were resized by a previous theme. I don’t know how many dead links fill my sites’ clickable cemetery but they must be in the thousands, and I’m not talking just about the stuff under wsbj.com\/sorabji. I’ve used Movable Type, WordPress, Gallery2, Piwigo, and hand-crafted HTML, among many other platforms.<\/p>\n
I also rarely delete much of anything on my computers and external drives. So when an old post on this site has dead images it should be as simple as finding a copy of those images somewhere on my sprawling collection of drives, right?<\/p>\n
Somehow that doesn’t always work out. Today I spent two hours trying to find the images that were missing from this post<\/a>, in which I attempted a before and after sequence of photos from Times Square, with the “before” photo being a 1940s-era Kodachrome slide I found on eBay. I finally found the two missing images but man, what a long way to go for a post no one will probably ever see again anyway.<\/p>\n The search unearthed a wealth of other images, random as hell, from my seemingly bottomless coffers. To find the old Times Square image I searched against its base filname, which was “image142<\/a>“. This turned up every image with that filename, including a woman’s crotch, some random clothing, a picture my dad took of some dude next to a portrait of Eisenhower, and some dude standing in a field.<\/p>\n\n\t\t