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↓ part 2
You may have already seen this notice that pops up every now and then on some old private website/homepage:
Under Construction
the note is often accompanied by a small .gif animation, a yellow warning sign with a stick figure on it, shoveling.
I think today the Under Construction note has become somewhat rare. Most users no longer maintain their own private website—or they have simply put together some hosted solutions from some corporate service. Paid or free solutions, who cares, important that the personal website today always appears to be perfectly built, superb, slick, modern, pixel, brutalist, whatever trendy, business-ready professional, most important never lacks any content–never never must be Under Construction.
But let’s stick to the past… The funny thing about those websites stating they’re currently Under Construction/Coming Soon was: once the note has been put on the website, it is very likely that it has been doomed to never be finished and to persist in this state of editing for all eternity (i.e. until the hosting provider or your friendly archiver’s hosting support is somewhen cancelled).
The other day i saw the shovel figure again, but somehow thought of it as not shoveling a perfect construction sand pyramid, but maybe digging for something, look again:
Like an archaeologist digging for something on that old forgotten website. Unfortunately, now i cannot remember the http address, but this website was an astonishing cyber ruin. I don’t want to become nostalgic about some broken hyperlinks and images and such, but days after the visit i still had some images in my mind from that hyper ruin. I decided it would be fun to become an archaeologist myself, maybe even with the little shovel and started digging for similar cyber ruins.
At some point i drifted away from the research and tried to build my own cyber ruins. On this page i have collected some examples. Like any ruin, they only appear unfinished and Under Construction. However they are in fact just already rotten and forgotten.
