About

About this site

GoCopernicus publishes about science, history and learning. It also happens to sit on a domain with a long and genuinely strange history, which is worth being straight about.

What was here before

From 1998 to 2002 this address hosted a K-12 education portal. It ran a weekday digest called Dr. Copernicus, a monthly Channel Guide, subject directories, and multi-week virtual expeditions to Antarctica, Egypt and Borneo. It was a real publication with a real audience of teachers and students.

That project wound down in 2002. The organisation behind it continued under a different name and is still trading today as a separate company with no connection to this site — nothing here is published by them, on their behalf, or under any brand of theirs.

What happened to the domain afterwards

Nothing good. Between 2005 and 2008 it was picked up and run as an adult directory alongside a set of advertising doorway pages, some of which deliberately targeted the education keywords the domain still ranked for. It sat parked for most of the following decade. In 2021 and 2022 it carried injected Chinese-language spam.

Every URL from those three periods returns 410 Gone. They are not redirected anywhere, because redirecting them would pass whatever links they accumulated into this site, and those are not links worth having.

What this rebuild is

The May–December 1999 editorial — 430 entries across 235 days — is restored at its original URLs. It is the site's own writing, republished where it was first published.

Two things are deliberately not reproduced. The old subject directories consisted of site reviews licensed from an encyclopaedia publisher, and the drawing module was licensed from an illustrator. Those copyrights belong to their authors and did not transfer with the domain, so those routes carry original writing instead.

Who publishes it

GoCopernicus is published by LumoraBuild.