othertime.com

About this archive

This site is a frozen copy. Nothing on it is generated at request time, no database is running behind it, and no comment form will accept your input. It exists so that twenty years of othertime.com stays readable.

What was here

othertime.com ran on at least four different systems over its life. By the time this archive was made, three of them were gone from the server:

A fifth install — a bare WordPress at the site root with a single 2023 post reading “Doing a little reboot to the website” — had replaced the front page. That reboot is what prompted this archive.

How it was captured

Posts, pages, comments, categories and media metadata were read from each WordPress install's REST API and written to _source/rest/*.json, which is committed here unmodified as the provenance record. tools/wp2jekyll.py converts those snapshots into the Jekyll documents that build this site; tools/mirror-assets.sh pulls down every referenced file plus the browsable media directories.

Post bodies are preserved as the HTML WordPress rendered, not reformatted into Markdown. Internal links that pointed at ?p= query-string permalinks have been rewritten to their new static paths, and _redirects / htaccess-redirects.conf keep the old URLs working.

The gallery, recovered

The Gallery2 install at /galllery/ (the three-l spelling is original) had been returning HTTP 500 for years, and 47 links from eight posts pointed into it. Its 289 photographs were pulled off the server's disk and are now in the gallery.

The Gallery2 database did not survive, and that database held the mapping from a g2_itemId to a filename. Albums were therefore matched to the posts that referenced them using EXIF capture dates, album names and photo counts — the reasoning for each match is printed on the album page. Which individual photograph sat in which slot of a post is not recoverable that way: item ids advance irregularly, so position cannot be inferred safely. Those slots are marked in place and link to the album they came from rather than show a photograph that may be the wrong one.

What is still missing

The following 78 paths appear in the Internet Archive but no longer resolve on the origin server: