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I’ve got a couple of website updates I need to announce in the next couple of days, but first, there’s one which… If you really want to, you can do with this very post!

All Pages and Posts are now downloadable as a PDF. Although I hope not to do a complete redesign (again) of this website for the next few years at least, I hate the fact that:

• Trying to save any post / page on this website via PDF print functions just shows you my ugly face and no text for the most part. It’s just the way this template is built, so I humbly apologise.
• As valuable a resource Archive.org / WaybackMachine is, it doesn’t like formatted webpages, so at best you get some text on screen sans pictures / tempates, and at worse, what you get is unreadable full stop. It depends on hosting platforms, templates, CSS, use of page builders, and so much more.

In terms of the latter, I took a moment to look through the Archive.org website for both this site, and a previous Sim Racing league I ran. Despite this website being in use since 2005, there are no longer any crawls from 2005 – 2018, despite this previously being the case. From what I can tell, WaybackMachine did a re-indexing at some point, and a lot of content was tossed, either by mistake or being seen to no longer be neccessary. This is a shame, as I did miss seeing some of my old iterations of this site, to see both how far I’ve come as a person, but also a web-designer.

Where I did find previous editions of this site, the front pages looked to be rendered properly, however once you go to say individual blog posts, this changed. Looking at the 2018 version of this site, the front page and blog listing page were fine, however blog posts… Not so much.

It seems that if you build a one page website, like I did for my old Sim Racing League, things have a better chance of rendering properly. I guess that it did help that I used icons for this site instead of images, and the code was compact due to its nature. Some older versions of the site have just had everything stripped back to text. It looks shit.

In short, if you want to keep things, save a copy. Which is what I do these days, as I get bored of going back through old SQL databases!

Things to remember

Of course, PDFs do come with their own risk. You, dear reader need to remember. First of all, the PDF you get is what’s written on a post / page at a particular point in time.  It may have changed prior, and it may change in the future. Therefore, you can’t rely on it for anything more than a snapshot in time. I’ve added a last modified date  to the end of all my posts, to help with you working out when I last revisited anything I’ve written, and as always, the older the source, the less reliable it may be as a point of reference, especially in opinion pieced.

If you really are considering using anything on this site as a reference, there are ways to consider this in both Harvard and Chicago (at least). You’ll need to remember the date you’ve downloaded such a PDF (Which you can find in the file properties, by right clicking and selecting properties on Windows, or Alt-Clicking and selecting Get Info on a Mac). You can also use the last modified date to help guide you on this. It’s important to include this information, in case… I become a MAGA Republican overnight or something?

Additionally, remember that these are my writings, opinions and interpretations alone. They are not gospel. Where I can, I’ll link to my own research when discussing a topic, however remember that I can’t accept any responsibility for mistakes. Do what I call ‘Chasing the references’, and using what I write alongside other texts, for better or worse.

Peace & Love xx

Last Updated on 19th December 2024 by Wil Vincent