Jason Tate at Chorus.fm has undertaken a fun preservation project involving the “best of” lists published on his former website, Absolutepunk.net.
The story of what happened to ap.net is too long to get into here, but the gist is that after several years of trying, Jason managed to get the site back from the corporate reapers that he had previously sold it to. During its time under B̶u̶z̶z̶n̶e̶t̶ B̶u̶z̶z̶m̶e̶d̶i̶a̶ ̶S̶p̶i̶n̶M̶e̶d̶i̶a̶ ̶L̶L̶C̶ SpinMedia Group, the site grew to a size that Jason couldn’t host independently. And so he made the difficult decision to let AbsolutePunk die, and with it over a decade’s worth of news articles, reviews, and forum threads.
For a while at least, a decent amount of material for the old forum and news feed was available on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. It appears that is no longer the case as any searches on the tool result in the response, "This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine."
Still he’s managed to scrape together these lists from 2005-2015. It’s great to revisit these lists again.
From Jason:
When I re-designed the new website and put together the new “End of the Year” feature page, I added a bunch of old lists from the AbsolutePunk days as well. They’re a lot of fun to read back through and remember the albums, remember the arguments, and see which ones have held up and which ones are hilariously all over the place.