In the summer of 2001 a secondary school student in Khobar built a website for his football club, on his own, in Microsoft FrontPage. It had a friendly address, alqadsaih.cjb.net, which forwarded to a folder on a free Arabic hosting service called شبكة الضيافة — d1d.net/1/yyy/. The newspaper wrote about it that July. Then the address expired, and for twenty-five years the answer to “is any of it left” was no.
It was the wrong question. The Internet Archive holds twenty captures of alqadsaih.cjb.net and every one of them is the forwarding stub — the address never held a page. The pages were on d1d.net, under a folder nobody had thought to ask about. Seven of them are there, and six of the buttons.
Open the site — live the menu rebuilt from aart.htm, the buttons in place, the pages that survive reachable from itor read the recovered files on their own, unassembled: index.htm · aart.htm · aat.htm · angaz.htm · awla.htm · sports.htm · www.htm
What survives, and what does not
The site's own menu — read out of aart.htm, the one page whose navigation the crawler saved whole — names eleven pages. Four of them were captured. The rest were not, and are gone.
| page | the site's own label | button | |
|---|---|---|---|
| sfh.htm | الصفحة الرئيسية | gone | — |
| nbd.htm | نبذة عن النادي | gone | — |
| moq.htm | موقع النادي | gone |  |
| ro.htm | رؤساء سابقون | gone | — |
| rmz.htm | الرمز و الشعار | gone |  |
| aat.htm | اعضاء الشرف | survives |  |
| angaz.htm | انجازات الفريق | survives | — |
| akb.htm | اخبار النادي | gone | — |
| awla.htm | دوري الدرجة الاولى | survives | — |
| sports.htm | مواقع رياضية | survives |  |
| msmm.htm | مصمم الموقع | gone |  |
| — | سجل الزوار | never linked | — |
| www.htm | اتصل بنا — راسلنا | survives |  |
Two of those rows are pages we hold under a different filename, which Khalid identified: mwa.htm — مواقع رياضية — is sports.htm, and راسلنا is www.htm. So five of the thirteen rows lead somewhere.
sports.htm is a directory of 57 Saudi football sites on the 2001 web — clubs, forums, magazines, player pages, half of them on cjb.net, arank, 8k, khayma, angelfire and ayna www.htm is an appeal to supporters of every Eastern Province club to stand behind Al-Qadsiah. The front page, index.htm, turns out not to be the club site at all but the author's own portal, headed الراجح.
The newspaper and the archive agree
الميدان الرياضي of Thursday 26 July 2001, issue 10268, described what was on the site. Read it against the buttons above:
موقع النادي. مواقع رياضية. اعضاء الشرف. Three of the six surviving buttons, in the order the paper listed them. The article goes on to describe الشعار, the emblem — red and yellow for the battle of Qadisiyyah, held between two wings — and there is a button for that too. The clipping was written from the site; the buttons were cut from the same site; neither knew the other would last.
What was changed
The bytes are the 2001 bytes. Four things were altered and they are listed on the reconstruction's own about page: a live tracking beacon was neutralised, the front page navigation is drawn from FrontPage's own recorded specification because the button images were never uploaded, dead internal links now say so, and two Flash movies are marked missing.