Max Glenister

I was talking to someone about foobar2000 and how prolific I’d been in the customisation scene back in the day. I knew I’d written up a detailed config somewhere, with screenshots and everything, but the domain was long gone and I hadn’t thought about it in years. On a whim I punched moglenstar.net into the Wayback Machine and there it was, cached HTML from a site I’d let lapse almost two decades ago. That led to more searching.

The earliest post on this blog used to be from October 2010. I knew there was older stuff out there, on domains I’d moved away from, but I’d assumed it was just gone. It wasn’t. I ended up recovering 117 posts stretching back to January 2004, along with 348 archived comments, 81 images, and enough CSS nostalgia to make me wince.

The timeline

I’m approaching 40 this year and I’ve had a blog for over half my life. In that time, the platforms and domains changed constantly. Prior to 2004 I’d used countless free hosting platforms (Geocities, cjb.net, ISP-provided web space), built with FrontPage and Notepad. I’m glad I can’t find any of those.

• moglenstar.net (2004-2007) - my first proper domain. A custom PHP blog I’d built called CMOGS, then Textpattern, then Movable Type, then WordPress, then Blogger, then WordPress again. Five platform changes in three years.
• omgmog.net (2007-2009) - WordPress 2.2, mostly R4DS flash cartridge themes and a CSS tutorial
• blog.omgmog.net (2010-2011) - Tumblr, then Octopress. Userscripts, book reviews, Minecraft. This eventually became the current Jekyll blog.
• 3dp.omgmog.net / status.omgmog.net (2017-2018) - small Jekyll-powered blogs on subdomains. 3D printing, VR, and other hobby stuff. status.omgmog.net was eventually superseded by social.omgmog.net.

The moglenstar.net domain lapsed around 2007 and ended up with a domain broker. The omgmog.net blog content got lost somewhere between Tumblr and Octopress migrations. Most of the early blog.omgmog.net posts didn’t survive the move to Jekyll either. The subdomain blogs went offline when I stopped maintaining them.

The rabbit hole

What started as a whim became a two-week obsession. I’d find a post, then notice a sidebar link to another post I hadn’t seen, then search for that one, then find a reference to an image that might still exist somewhere. Each recovery led to three more searches.

I have a box of old hard drives. I went through them all, one by one with a USB enclosure, scouring folders and moving anything useful to my NAS. Found a 2011 Octopress backup I didn’t remember making. Searched my Dropbox archive for screenshots I’d uploaded to cl.ly a decade ago. The compulsion wasn’t just to recover the content, it was to get it right: the correct dates, the original formatting, the images that belonged with each post.

moglenstar.net (60 posts)

The Wayback Machine had about 5,000 captures of moglenstar.net between 2004 and 2010. Most of the later ones are the domain broker’s parking page, but filtering those out I found 60 blog posts across five different eras.

Early 2004 was a custom PHP blog on the homepage, then a Textpattern install at /site/, then briefly Movable Type at /max/. Diary-style entries about building a PC, being bored at college, and promising to finish the site design. Over the course of a week in January I ordered parts, built the thing, got a BIOS error, diagnosed a RAM compatibility issue, then hit a graphics card incompatibility. Five posts about it, all ending with some variation of “hopefully it’ll work tomorrow.” The Textpattern posts from March and April are mostly procrastination and coursework avoidance. The /max/ posts from May and June are even more sparse, one is literally just ...

Late 2004 was WordPress 1.0.1 at /journal/. Posts about web design, CSS, and being annoyed about college assignments. “yes, i’ve installed wordpress, and i’m using a template.. so shoot me.”

2005 was Blogger-powered. Just two posts, both about redesigning the site again.

Early 2006 started with WordPress on the K2 theme, one of the popular “Web 2.0” WordPress themes with rounded corners and Ajax comments. Site redesigns, pixel art, CSS tutorials. This is where I started sharing foobar2000 configs on the Neowin and Hydrogenaudio forums and getting actual traffic.

Mid-to-late 2006 was a custom WordPress theme with a green header. The most interesting stuff here: a detailed foobar2000 tutorial with 75 comments, four pixel art icon sets, Windows Media Player 11-style playback buttons, and a Columns UI config with colour schemes.

I recovered four icon sets I’d designed (grey media icons, icecons, mog blue, no-hue). They’re tiny, 16x16 or 20x20 pixels, hand-pixelled. Very much of the era.

The posts are short. Really short. “so all of a sudden everything costs money, eh?” is the entire text of one of them. Reading them back is painful. Not because they’re badly written (they are), but because they’re so earnest. Pure LiveJournal energy. I’m writing about my maths exam, my nephew’s birthday, buying jeans, fixing a family friend’s PC. One post is just me being excited about a heatsink arriving.

I’d completely forgotten about the PC build saga. Five posts in January 2004, each one ending with “hopefully it’ll work tomorrow” as I diagnosed one hardware incompatibility after another. I remembered building a PC that year. I didn’t remember the RAM compatibility issues, the graphics card that wouldn’t work with the motherboard, the week of troubleshooting. Turns out it was the internal floppy drive shorting to ground the whole time. Reading it back felt like finding someone else’s diary.

Where the Wayback Machine had captured comments, I pulled those in too. 99 comments across eight posts, now displayed alongside the archived content. Most are foobar2000 questions (“how do you change the color schemes?”) but some are from people I’d forgotten existed. One comment on a Columns UI config post is from someone called Dawn, apologising for not saying more because she was “still wearing off some Grey Goose and Tequila” after a pool party. I have no memory of who Dawn was.

omgmog.net (8 posts)

I moved to omgmog.net in 2007 and initially set it up WordPress 2.2. The Wayback Machine had less coverage here, but I found eight posts.

Four of them were R4DS flash cartridge themes (Tango, Bone, Vista, Panda), pixel art skins for the Nintendo DS flash cartridge menu. I was active on the GBATEmp forums at the time, sharing themes and configs. The preview images were hosted on omgmog.net/things/ which is gone now. The theme files themselves are gone. All that survives is the post text and the tag pixel-art.

The moanlog CSS tutorial from 2009 is the most complete post from this era. Full code blocks, HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript to provide input placeholder functionality. The placeholder attribute handles this now, but this was before HTML5 was widely supported.

A Snow Leopard hackintosh guide turned up when I realised my existing 2010 post referenced an earlier version I’d written on omgmog.net. The Wayback Machine had the full page including 11 comments from people trying to follow the instructions. There was also a jQuery tutorial, and a post about launching Dingoonity.

blog.omgmog.net (12 posts)

I had a local backup of the blog from around 2010-2011 sitting on an old external drive. It was an Octopress install with 28 posts. The blog had started on Tumblr in 2010, moved to Octopress later that year, then switched to Jekyll Bootstrap in 2012 before settling on plain Jekyll. Cross-referencing against what already existed on the current blog, I found 17 posts that hadn’t been migrated. Five of those were Tumblr reblogs or single-sentence posts, so I skipped them and brought over the remaining 12.

Some of these had images hosted on cl.ly (CloudApp) or Dropbox public folders. cl.ly is gone, but I found a backup of my Dropbox Public folder on the same drive. That saved the images for four posts: a Grooveshark userscript with six screenshots, a Smashing Book 2 review with four photos, and a Google+ userstyle for Reddit with two screenshots.

The rest of the cl.ly-hosted images are gone. The Kindle 3 review, Minecraft posts, and Pac-Man Moleskine post all have dead image links now.

The recovered posts are a mix of userscripts (Grooveshark view modes, Reddit tools, Notched for Minecraft forums), book reviews, jQuery debugging, and a CoffeeScript comparison. Peak 2011 web developer stuff. The last one chronologically is from April 2012, about ditching Twitter Bootstrap and building a custom theme for what was by then a Jekyll blog.

The blog.omgmog.net era was also when I used Disqus for comments. I’d forgotten about that until I went looking for an old account and found I could still export everything. The XML dump contained 249 non-spam comments spanning 2010 to 2016. Most of the URLs in the export matched posts that still existed on the current blog, so parsing the XML and injecting comments into the right posts was straightforward. A handful used Tumblr’s numeric post IDs (/post/1265485126) instead of slugs, which took some manual mapping to resolve.

The Disqus comments are a different flavour from the moglenstar.net ones. Less “how do I change the colour scheme?” and more “great post!” or technical follow-ups. A surprising number are from bots or now-deleted accounts. But there are real conversations too: someone asking about Postgres on Mountain Lion, readers sharing their own Fitbit experiences, a back-and-forth about CSS pre-processors that aged poorly. 249 comments across 50 posts, now displayed alongside the content they were responding to.

3dp.omgmog.net / status.omgmog.net (37 posts)

3dp.omgmog.net was a Jekyll blog for 3D printing. I bought an Anycubic Kossel delta printer in October 2017 and immediately started documenting everything. Calibration problems, first prints, filament tests, printer mods, things I’d designed and printed. 25 posts total, from unboxing through to custom macro keys for my keyboard.

Then I just… stopped posting about it. I kept printing, kept designing things, but the novelty of documenting every print wore off. Classic new hobby arc. Twelve posts from status.omgmog.net survived: bash aliases, a book review, a Daydream VR guide, Windows VPN setup, Android emulator notes, Ubuntu on a MacBook, an Arduboy kit build, and some game development notes.

The process

The Wayback Machine’s CDX API (web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx) gives back a list of every captured URL for a domain. I fed moglenstar.net and omgmog.net through it, filtered out the duplicates and parking pages, and ended up with a list of unique post URLs to fetch. I’d built a scraping tool for a previous Wayback Machine project, and the fetching approach worked the same way here.

curl "web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=moglenstar.net/*&output=json&fl=timestamp,original"

Each era used different markup, so extracting the post content was a lot of BeautifulSoup and regular expressions. Title from one selector, date from another, body from a third. Six different site layouts across the moglenstar.net captures meant six different sets of extraction rules. Nothing clever, just a lot of soup.find() calls and some sed for cleanup.

# the 2006 wordpress era
title = soup.find("h2", class_="storytitle").text
date = soup.find("h3", class_="date").text
body = soup.find("div", class_="storycontent")
comments = soup.find_all("li", class_="comment")

The Octopress posts were simpler. I had the files locally, already well-structured HTML. Converting to Jekyll markdown was mostly stripping tags and reformatting code blocks with a shell script.

The presentation

I didn’t want the old posts to just appear as regular blog entries. They’re from a different time and a different site, and that should be obvious.

Each archived post gets wrapped in an “era fragment” that echoes the look of the original site. The moglenstar.net posts from 2004-early 2006 get a dark theme with yellow accents. The mid-2006 posts get the K2 WordPress theme look, slate blue-grey with orange links. The late-2006 posts get the custom “mogdotnet” theme, charcoal header with green accents. The omgmog.net and blog.omgmog.net posts have their own styles too.

The styling is approximate (the Wayback Machine didn’t preserve CSS consistently), but it’s enough to trigger the right kind of nostalgia. Seeing a post wrapped in that dark 2004 theme immediately puts me back in the mindset of a teenager customising every pixel of everything. The rounded corners and drop shadows of the K2 era are pure Web 2.0. The lime green of the 2010 Octopress blog feels like yesterday by comparison.

There’s also a notice at the top of each post explaining where it came from and when, so nobody mistakes my 2004 opinions for my current ones.

External links in archived posts get automatically rewritten to point through the Wayback Machine. Most of these sites don’t exist any more, and the ones that do (Neowin, Hydrogenaudio) have changed enough that the archived versions are more contextually relevant anyway.

The losses

Not everything made it. The Wayback Machine captured snapshots, not continuous archives. Some posts exist only as titles in a sidebar, the full content never crawled. The 2005 Blogger-powered era has just two posts, but I remember writing more. The Tumblr period probably had a dozen posts I never migrated and can’t find now.

The R4DS themes are the biggest loss. I designed four complete theme packs with custom icons and layouts. The preview images are gone, the download links are dead, and the themes themselves probably only exist on the SD cards of a few people who downloaded them in 2007. Somewhere out there, a Nintendo DS is booting up with my pixel art on it.

The remnants

Everything recovered has been added to this blog under its original date. The moglenstar.net posts are tagged with moglenstar, the omgmog.net posts have archive: omgmog.net in their front matter. I haven’t cleaned them up or rewritten them. Lowercase “i”, double dots instead of ellipses, missing apostrophes, emoticon text faces, “smile” where a forum smiley used to be. They’re exactly as they were.

The earliest post on this blog is now from January 2004. That’s 22 years of posting, with some gaps.

117 posts recovered. 348 comments preserved. 81 images found. Most of it terrible. All of it mine.

None of this would exist without the Internet Archive. They cached thousands of pages from my defunct domains, going back over two decades. A nonprofit storing 99+ petabytes of data, including 625 billion web pages, with no ads or paywalls. If any of this resonated, consider donating.