Hoards
My acts of preserving things of dubious value on the Internet Archive and our own Somnolescent Archives.
This page is a work in progress, but some content is available.
Neopets Art Gallery Megacrawl
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| Some of Caby's art submitted to the AG, featuring a blue Lutari. |
| (Rehosted on her ol fansite you should check it out...) |
This is a grab of all art curated in the Neopets user-submitted Art Gallery, from submissions made September 16, 2003 to February 10, 2022.
I made a VB program to load and export the HTML for all the gallery pages (bypassing the CloudFlare filter), and then wrote Python scripts to scrape them for the image URLs and index the metadata. The result is roughly 18 years of Neopets users' AG submissions, in an indexable form.
Background
Neopets.com was in an uncertain spot for quite a while after late 2021, with the Neopets Metaverse project causing quite a stir and TNT seeming to neglect the site's surging following in favor of a crowd of Ethereum investors with Bored Ape Yacht Club twitter avatars.
Neopets would be a fickle thing to preserve if it were to go down. It excludes itself from the Wayback Machine bot, and Neopets' "don't post elsewhere" rule on the AG meant there was, to my understanding, a real risk for entries that weren't scattered across social media platforms and Discord servers to get completely lost if the site were to go down.
Fortunately the Art Gallery remains up, and the Neopets Metaverse project is long discontinued with the game's new management. Hopefully the AG remains up, but in that time, this should be a decent backup for the earlier stuff just in case. I don't claim any ownership to the images; those rights go to Neopets (contractually) and the respective artists.
Links
- Archive.org link
- The main page for the project.
- Zipped userart
- Contents of the
http://upload.neopets.com/userart/art/folder grouped and zipped up by year for transport, and then a folder for each image with the metadata. Example:2018/2636 - sgerbwd - Around the Couldron/2018-10-22_334_0667030001540249744.gif - JSON index
- 7 megabyte file containing all the page, filename, date, submitter, and title data. Look here if you're searching for a specific one.
- Image urls
- Just a list of image urls if you'd rather download that.
If you choose to download a copy of the grab you can use organizer.py to sort it in whatever directory structure you want to browse it in, though a program like Everything is probably ideal here.
mp3.com
While the mp3.com historian role title probably is well earned by Cammy, I have thrown together a couple of mp3.com archive related things- a playlist maker and an mpd/Icecast radio station (that is currently live!). I haven't yet made it auto restart so it may go down at any time.
I fetched the urls by using the CDX api, per a Reddit suggestion. I grabbed https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=downloads.mp3.com/*&matchType=domain/&fl=original and filtered only the lines with .mp3 at the end. Then, I tacked https://web.archive.org/web/19971221151451/ before each line before downloading or linking to files, so it pulls from the actual archive. The playlist pulls a bunch of random ones from these, and the radio works similarly, though I have to add the songs manually (running a script to download a batch).
Enjoy! Note that there's no filter for what gets through into the radio, so you might get a track like "Bloody Fetus On The Dance Floor" from time to time. Sometimes you'll get easy listening, sometimes you'll get gospel rock, jazz or thrash metal- it's part of the fun.