Ways to look for old papercrafts with "dead links" on my weblog here?

Let's face it, the papercrafts that I found and shared with you all over the years since 2008 may have been deleted long tim ago by now... (of course the papercrafts that I made and shared myself since 2001 are all still available on my main website at www.ninjatoes.com 😊)

For the ones that you find in my blogposts here or that I shared in one of the link lists here though, you can still try to look whether they still exist? You can do that in various ways:

1) Use the dedicated search box

Maybe the creator just rearranged their website and just moved the webpages around? Most websites have a dedicated search box where you can look for the papercraft if you know the name (try what you find here on my blogposts here) or look for a more general search term (who knows what else you might find? 😀).

2) Do a site: search using Google

If the website doesn't have a dedicated search box, you can still do a site: search in Google. Go back to the URL of the website (including the http:// or https:// part), delete anything but the domain name (usually it ends with .com or something so that you know you're looking in the entire site) and then the search term that you're looking for, a space and then site: (including the colon) just in front of the domain name. You can write out the "code" for a site: search like so:

Then when you press enter, Google will search for your term in the entire site (depending whether you started on the main domain name, or a parent page if you wanted to 😀)

3 Use the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/)

Sometimes the whole website will (understandably) be gone though after some years... you can go to the Web Archive and see whether it has saved (crawled) the old site with the papercrafts you're looking for?

1. Type the URL or the papercraft download webpage (that's why I never delete old links in blogposts) in the Wayback Machine.
2. Then press "enter" and hopefully it will find a number of times when it "crawled" the site, indicated by a blue circle (green circles are redirects).
3. Choose a date close to the blogpost (or a newer date to see which newer papercrafts it had since I posted it and before the site went away?)
4. Then choose one of the times to see what it used to look like at that time and hopefully you can still download the papercrafts!

Sometimes you get lucky and you can still download the old papercraft, but sometimes the Internet Archive didn't actually save the actual papercraft file downloads (that's usually the case with filesharing sites like RapidShare (remember that? 😉), Megaupload or one of the many others) and then I can't really help you either...

Sometimes like on bigger sites that saved the downloads on its own webspace though, and the Internet Archive has crawled it at some point (there's luckily a lot of papercraft sites like that though), so you can still find it if you find the right date!

(4 Look around on other sites)

If the methods1-3 didn't help you, you may still find it if somebody else saved it before you on some other website (usually fun, popular papercrafts 👍)! Needless to say, if you find a papercraft that you like (even if you won't build it right away) just save it! 😀