On Twitter recently, Mark had downloaded the whole archive of his Twitter account’s history and had been poking through it and randomly retweeting amusing old tweets. I downloaded my own Twitter history and quickly realised that a lot of the old things I’d linked to weren’t accessible because I’d been using my own custom URL shortener (this was before the days of Twitter doing their own URL shortening) and it wasn’t running anymore. Fortunately I’d had the foresight to take a full copy of all of my data and databases from Dreamhost before I shut down my account, and one of those databases was the one that had been backing my URL shortener. A quick import to PostgreSQL Workers KV and a hacky Node.js Cloudflare Workers application later, it’s all up and running! I’m under no illusions that it’s almost ever going to be accessed by anyone except me, but it’s nice to have another part of my internet history working. I’ve been hosting my own website and images and whatnot (things like pictures I’ve posted on my blog née LiveJournal, or in threads on Ars Technica) in one form or another since about 2002, and the vast majority of those links and images still work!
Speaking of my website, about four years ago now I went and tried to collect all my old websites into a single archive so I could look back and see the progression. The majority of them I actually still had the original source code to, though my very first one or two have been totally lost. The earliest I still have is from March of 1998 when I was not quite fifteen years old! I started out with just HTML, then discovered CSS and Javascript rollover images, and then around 2001 I started using PHP. I had to go in and hack up some of the PHP-based sites in order to get them to work, and oh dear god 18-year-old me was a FUCKING AWFUL coder. One of the sites consisted of a bit over three thousand lines in a single file, with all sorts of duplication and terribleness, and every single one of the sites that was hooked into MySQL had SQL injection vulnerabilities. I’m very proud of just how much my code has improved over the years.
I went back this weekend and managed to recover another handful of sites, and also included exports of the Photoshop files where the original site source wasn’t available. I’ve packed them all up into a Docker container (I’ll write another post about my experiences with Docker at some point soon) and chucked them up on archive.virtualwolf.org for the entire Internet to marvel at how terrible they all were! There’s a little bit more background there, but it’s a lot of fun just looking back at what I did.