Outdoors-magazine.com

Front page says the site is going to close down soon.

Does anyone know what happened? I used to like that site and would visit from time to time.

Just wondering...

Don't know. I left a meassage for James. I had a load of articles there, I would hate to see it close down.

I loved that website! I got a lot of useful information, and read a lot of reviews on that site. I wonder why it will be closing. If anyone has answers, please post them!

Was a good site. No idea what is going on, but ETS has plenty of server space, happy to host any relevant articles.

That's a shame that Outdoors Magazine is closing down. I didn't do a lot of posting there, but I did a lot of reading.

I tried to access the site at 08.40 BST 14/10/08. Server cannot find the site.

So it appears to be gone.

nooo... i also tryed to access the site, but it's gone. Damn it. I didn't even save mine own articles on that website...

No word from James so far. I wrote all my articles in word and then pasted them in, but I did not keep an image directory that would make reconstruction all that easy...

Sad to see this one gone as it had a pretty nice author interface.

It was probably time, unfortunately. Most of the articles were pretty old and repetitive.

If there is a specific article you want you can try doing a google search on "outdoors-magazine.com XXX" where XXX = subject (trust me, don't just use XXX, especially at work). Then look at the cached version of the page you want. Unfortunately, this won't give you the pictures but it does give you the text.

-Blast

Some of the content can also be found at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://outdoors-magazine.com/

Yes, if possible he should try to spin it off. He might be thinking "nobody wants this" but usually there is someone who does. And they will usually be willing to pay a few hundred bucks for it. If they know how to market the site, they can usually make that back pretty easily. And the URL is worth something.

I know of 2 websites that the old owners got tired of the upkeep, and more or less gave to someone else. The new owner was really able to make it work much better. Sometimes it takes a fresh perspective.

Its disappointing...

Or maybe its just a botched server transfer, and after the DNS replicates it will be back.

Didn't they just start a new forum as well, not too long ago? Kind of strange to see it disappear like that. Do we know why yet?

I always liked that site, a lot of info on more traditional survival skills and equipment, as well as multi-cultural survival techniques.

Wonder if there's common ground with Jeff Potter's Out Your Backdoor?

http://www.outyourbackdoor.com/

(which maybe does not use readiness/preparedness/survival terminology too often but seems to share values of pragmatism, self-reliance, resourcefulness, community, quality equipment and enjoyment of being outdoors). Good stuff produced by essentially one fellow.

James emailed out his notice last night. He just needed more free time for himself and family, so let the domain expire.

It is not coming back. All the content was saved however, and I would not be surprised if some of it resurfaces in other places.

The magazine was made up of a tremendous number of authors and viewpoints, so while old and tired to some, had much more originality and diversity than I have ever seen anyplace else.

I will miss it as a good author friendly outdoors site.

Schwert, your articles were the best part of Outdoors-Magazine. I've thoroughly enjoyed reading them, and have several printed out in color to capture the wonderful photography that you integrate into your articles. The series on urban survival kits is excellent reading. Keep us posted if these articles become available somewhere else on the web or if you post future articles on another web page.

Is there any way someone else here with a website could get their hands on the articles and maybe host them on their own site (with permission of the original autors of course)? Many of them were well worth the read, it would be a shame just to let them die out completely.

Jim of OldJimbo's is going to host them I think. He cross hosted several of them when the magazine began.

He is currently downloading them. I downloaded them yesterday but all the images are lost. I imagine if Jimbo gets them up the various authors may be able to relink in some of the original images, or even better update some of their text and add new images.

I had a couple of articles that I had planned on reworking. I will let you know if Jimbo is sucessful with this.

Glad to hear that some of the information can be retrieved and hosted elsewhere.

Hello friends,

Thanks for the concerns. It was time for me to claim back this part of my life (and it was getting largely too much).

I pulled the plug without warning, because I know that any other solution would have kept me involved one way or another. And I am extremely happy about that !

Anyway, content is saved, and will popup slowly as archives.

Here is a server where you will find most articles.

All are in PDF format:
http://outdoors.free.fr/OM-PDF/

and a zip containing it all:
http://outdoors.free.fr/all-om-pdf.zip (275 MiB)

Cheers,
/JM

I'd suggest that one can't operate a site profitably with a traffic profile like this:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/equipped.org+outdoors-magazine.com/?metric=uv

http://www.quantcast.com/outdoors-magazine.com

It's one thing for a nonprofit org like equipped, but 9.5K pageviews isn't going to attract any kind of ad base, and it would seem that that's the case here.

Are you releasing this as Public Domain, Creative Commons or some other license?

I ask because I'll be happy to re-publish this stuff somewhere, but I need to know if it's free and clear for non-commercial use.

They are released for Private Use.

Any other agreement must now be concluded with the authors themselves.

PS: Quancast only shows US audience results. Mostly inappropriate for international sites. And I suggest that profit or profitability is not necessarily the ultimate goal of things people do on internet.

Well I went ahead and downloaded the zip file. Thanks.

JM has put up an archive version of Outdoors-Magazine.

http://outdoors.magazine.free.fr/

It looks like all the articles are now back for reading.

Schwert, thanks very much for giving us this link to the Outdoors Magazine archive.

It was your article "Urban Preparation Kit, part I" (October 2004) that first inspired me to learn more about being prepared.
I cannot thank you enough for the knowledge you've shared, and for a few simple words that continue to inspire me:

"... and if squished, at least I tried."

"if squished"...

I had forgotten I put that in. Thanks for the laugh today.


I have to say I am glad JM loaded these back up as an archive. I had a great time writing some of these and I know many other people did too.