I worked at Staples for a bit a few years ago. Our Staples was one of the lucky ones–our print center was outperforming so much, it basically kept the store afloat. Everything else, even tech, was down year after year. Staples as a business is an interesting victim of the times and of a lack of modernization (we at our store bemoaned that furniture should’ve become their big focus, not piling on extraneous services to stay afloat), but I worked with some seriously cool people, especially my GM, I learned how to build baskets with deadly efficiency (I’m ready to sell you Asurion protection right now), and the nights spent setting up new PCs and installing Windows for customers were pretty comfy looking back. Amazon returns were less so.
This is Protoweb, though, and 25 years ago, things looked different! Paper catalogs on request, Staples credit cards, a small business rewards program called DIVIDEND$ with a dollar sign, a “155% Ultimate Price Protection” guarantee–there was no Party City partnerships or pilot programs to sell Pupperoni, just everything you need to keep your business running smooth. Staples has also had some pretty great ad campaigns over the years. I obviously don’t need to tell you about the Easy Button (which this Protoweb restoration predates), but I always have to come back to watch the Snowbot commercial every couple months. “He can’t have her! I love her!” Wonderful stuff.
Just like my WVIA restoration, I felt like I was the prime candidate to restore staples.com for Protoweb (thanks to Spilledmilkz for the suggestion). It was a pretty uneventful restoration, given the great condition the site was in, so in the absence of proper stories to tell about it, I’ll tell you a little about how I restore websites.
We have a special crawler bot for Protoweb called Warnick which takes in a specific Wayback Machine date for a site, grabs a small amount of it to start off with, and then downloads any other pages and assets as they get requested. When the grab is done, I click around the site using the contributor-only proxy, which can access in-progress restorations. This also lets me spot problem areas that need special repair, like images I have to recreate. I then download the entire site from my Contributor Portal and put it on a personal WAMP Web server I have for sites I’m working on, Protoweb or otherwise. That way, I can run spider tools on the site or do find-in-files on all the HTML files for anything I’m looking for without clogging up Protoweb with extra requests.
Once any interactive elements are rebuilt and the wgets for missing links come up clean, I reupload it back to Protoweb and submit for review. That’s for a fairly simple restoration! The end result is always satisfying, though, and I hope you find it interesting to click around too.
