Intro
I don’t usually provide tips on productive use of Internet tools, but, since I needed this one myself today, and I wasn’t 100% sure it was going to work, I think this is worth mentioning.
unece.org – completely broken
A not-so-pretty error message gets spit out, including the text:
Configuration Error: 404 page "/webhome/unece.org/www/fileadmin/read.txt" could not be found. |
which reveals just a little too much about the hosting environment (i.e., shared) in my opinion.
Who cares? I like this site because it can act as a sort of arbiter in assigning three-letter names to virtually any locale around the world that has more than a few thousand people. Put the UN two-letter country code in front of that and you have a short, unique five-letter reference to any town or city in the world. This is my bookmark: http://www.unece.org/cefact/locode/service/location.htm
But today it’s not working. Maybe they’ll fix it tomorrow. Who knows? But I need a location code today. What to do? Well, it’s clearly a simple-minded site with static content – a perfect candidate for the Wayback machine at archive.org.
Long story short, yes, a July, 2011 site version was archived and is available. The archived link becomes:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110605223242/http://www.unece.org/cefact/locode/service/location.htm
And, cool, we’re in business and able to look up location codes!