Louis Wain Archive
I’ve been busy setting up some infrustructure now that I feel like my self-hosting skills are up-to-par. I’m at a point where I can finally implement some services I’ve been wanting to offer for some time. The first will be an archive of the images on catland.distin.org. This was done via scraping the Internet Archive mirror of the wiki (at the recommendation of the site admins). This is a wiki cataloging high resolution scans of the collected works of Louis Wain, an English artist who loved drawing cats. Every cat-themed profile picture I have is one of his works, and I thought it might be worthwile to give these scans some exposure so someone else could be similarly insipired. You can find the archive here, though you should really use catland for anything other than bulk downloading since mine is a stripped copy of a stripped copy of the wiki.
I compiled this archive using StrawberryMaster’s fork of wayback-machine-downloader, with a small modification due to the massive filenames of the scans (see here). The command (using the new option implemented in my fork) is
wayback_machine_downloader https://catland.distin.org/_images -p 1000 --limit-filenames
This is also a soft launch of my Forgejo instance where my fork is hosted. Registration isn’t avaliable as of writing but do let me know if you would like an account for whatever reason.