User blog:JoshuaJSlone/HelloProject.com radically changes! Links break! Sky falls!

This was bound to happen sooner or later. HelloProject.com has had a complete makeover, so radical that most or all of our links pointing to it no longer work. At least the discography ones appear to be toast. As that's something I've worked a lot with, that's what I'm focusing on for the rest of this entry.


 * Old "Mystery Night! / Eighteen Emotion" discography link, now giving a 404.
 * Archived version of the page as it was on March 25.
 * New "Mystery Night! / Eighteen Emotion" discography page.

The good news about the new pages is they seem more full of information. It lists lyricist, composer, and arranger for each track. Gives lengths for tracks, and even lengths for DVD segments. The cover preview images aren't huge, but no longer tiny. The better news is I see these changes even in effect for 15 year old Morning Musume releases, so there's a lot of information there that previously would've been a bigger hassle to find.

The bad is it doesn't seem like everything made the transition, or at least I'm not sure where to be found.

Example 1: Koi no Dance Site was released as a miniCD, LP, and VHS at various dates in early 2000, then rereleased as a full size CD in 2005. On the new Morning Musume release list it's sorted to the original release date of the miniCD in 2000. The actual page it leads to has information about both CD releases, but only lists the date of the rerelease. I don't see information about the VHS or LP versions anywhere. It looks like Single Vs are still listed separately, though, and at a glance I do see at least one VHS gets its own page too.

Example 2: Where are the old/minor groups? Their artist page has basically the same major set we have on this wiki's front page + Kenshuusei. From these individual pages you can get to the release information. Morning Musume has a page at helloproject.com/morningmusume/, and then their release information is at helloproject.com/morningmusume/release/. But what about, say, v-u-den information? Or today's Satoyama release? Gone or just hidden, I don't know. Maybe once the new site has been around for more than a few hours and robots have had their chance to look around Google can help find some information.

For these pages that don't have new versions, I would recommend not just deleting the links to them, but replacing them with archive links like I did near the top of this entry. Maybe even for the odd case where not all of the old information is retained, have both. Some extra hassle, but I think it beats losing good information from one of the few official sources out there. Probably not many are as interested in bothering with this stuff as me, so at least I'd ask you to just not delete the now-broken links, as it will make the task simpler for when someone does get to it.

Archive link tip: It is possible to search the Internet Archive for an URL, see all the dates they have saved copies from, and find a particular one to link to. But here is a shortcut that should do for us what we need here: just add http://wayback.archive.org/web/20140422000000/ before any existing URL. That will basically tell it to go to the most recent copy it has from before the big site change. So the link for today's Satoyama release would end up http://wayback.archive.org/web/20140422000000/http://www.helloproject.com/discography/satonoakari_triplet_odatomo/d_001.html It's possible some links we have here wouldn't be in the archive, but I doubt it.