September 10, 1998

by Steve Baldwin

The back-to-school season always exerts an oddly schizoid effect on the number of Ghost Sites clogging the Web's navigational waters. Many sites maintained by returning college students are updated in September, decreasing the Ghost Site population markedly.

But many other college-hosted home pages grow petrified and moribund in September. This is because many graduates simply forgot to shut down, obliterate, and purge their sites before checking out of their dorms for the last time in the Spring.

By September, these same grads are already entering the workforce to begin lifelong periods of servitude to Microsoft, GE, or the Pittsfield Cab Company, and the last thing on their minds is to update their old college sites, even if their Alma Maters would let them (and they won't). So until the Computer Science Department pulls the plug, the spectral remains of these departed students will live on for years - possibly decades.

To celebrate the back-to-school season, Ghost Sites devotes a large section of this issue's coverage to dead university pages littering the Groves of Academe.

This ancient page, "under construction" for more than three years, resides on one of Vassar College's retired servers.

Like many Ghost Sites, its years of neglect are revealed in its many broken links. What makes it fascinating, however, is how much neglect seems to have been built into it from its inception, in terms of the high number of spelling errors it contains ("Vassar College operates the oldest undergraduate degree granding program in cognitive science in the nation", and "completion during the senior year of an independent research project on a tope chosen by the student" are two such examples of neglect).

We're confident that spending $21,600 a year for a Vassar education is going to turn our offspring into first-class semioticians, but how much money would it take to teach the kids a little spelling?

Site is Dead, Shows Advanced Decay

Every six months or so, I run into this peculiar site on my lonely travels through the Net's morgue. But something always stops me from declaring Waxweb dead. Maybe it's because I'm not sure that this odd 1994 hypermedia experiment - part nonlinear text, part cryptic images, part time capsule - was ever alive.

Approach this dead site with caution: its maddeningly nonlinear hodgepodge of cryptic images, self-important philosophical ramblings, and pointless existential encounters between imaginary characters induce a weird, fuguelike mood that's hard to shake.

Site is Dead, but Well-Preserved

This crusty site, housed at the Nonlinear Science Institute at the University of California at San Diego, generates random Web site links from a huge grid of lookalike images. Like the famous URL Roulette, its appeal to the adventurous is to send them to a randomly selected Web site when you click on a "point".

Unfortunately, the degree of randomness provided by a Thousand Points of Sites is considerably diminished by the number of dead links it references. So in operation, there's almost nothing unpredictable about it, because almost every "point" links to an identical "File Not Found" message.

This is kind of like playing a Ghost Sites version of Mine Sweeper. Just click on any "point" and see if you can avoid being blown up by an Error 404!

Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum

Natalie Engel is (or was) a college student at Hampshire College whose home page provides a close look at contemporary undergraduate obnoxiousness (including a message which asks "What are you, some kind of Pervert?" when a user clicks to her second page). Her page of links is impressively broken, a situation to which Engel would probably respond "So what? Live with it, creep".

But Engel hoists herself by her own petard when she declares "this home page will not make you want to take a little nap." Frankly, it makes us want to take a big one - to sleep for a thousand years, and then to wake up to find Engel's page still glowering at us.

Site is Dead, But Well-Preserved

CrapFinder was launched to poke fun at Time-Warner's Pathfinder, a site I used to work for. Although its satirical intent hasn't aged well, the site now functions as a priceless historical record of Pathfinder's 2.0 redesign, which was commissioned after months of backbreaking focus-group research. Because all traces of this redesign were long ago purged from the real site's servers, CrapFinder provides the only extant copy of the way Pathfinder actually looked during its crucial 1995-1996 period.

The fact that CrapFinder outlived Pathfinder 2.0 supports a theory I've long held about Internet History, which is that much of the task of Web preservation will be left to pirates, hackers, and copyright violaters.

Corporations often are positively Orwellian about erasing their past "crude" Web experiments. But outlaws often serve Posterity well, because they frequently save things from the digital dumpster that no sane copyright holder would preserve (like this redesign).

Site is Dead, But Well-Preserved

Ghost Site Watcher Glenn Booth was kind enough to send this decaying piece of New York's digital infrastructure on to us. Central Park SummerStage 1995 is a guide to music, film, and cultural events in NYC's famed park that's over 1,000 days out of date, but still calls the urban masses forth to gather with Anna Quinlan, Black Stalin, Joan Osborn, and hundreds of other performers who've probably forgotten they were ever there.

Adding insult to injury, the site's link to an updated 1996 event schedule is broken, although many other links dutifully lead to similarly antiquated pages recounting exciting "current" events occurring in New York's distant past.

Site is Dead, But Well-Preserved

CNN runs a pretty good news site, so why is it still mucking about with this decaying shrine to Valentine's Day, 1996? This oddly conceived site features the salacious voice of CNN Sports Anchor Bob Lorenz, plus a mildewing box of obsolete links, including one to People Magazine's electronic valentine card service, which apparently will fire off a Valentine any day of the year if you tell it to.

Frankly, if anyone sent us a Valentine's card in the middle of September, we'd sic Interpol on them for Net Stalking.

Site is Stuffed, Embalmed, and Ready for Internet Museum

"We're outa here", this jaunty corpse announces. A defunct e-zine devoted to supplying "advice for users who couldn't afford the biggest and best of computer equipment", Windows Rag went under when its editor-in-chief was hired by Microsoft to head up HTML development at MSN.COM sometime in 1995.

Before Microsoft assimilated every last synapse of brain matter at this site, Windows Rag managed to win a 3-star rating from McKinley.Com's editorial team - which was itself assimilated into Excite.Com long ago. Ashes to ashes.

Site is Dead, but Well-Preserved