Back from the dead! Back to the Future! This website started in November 2000, and it's going to start that way again

A friend of mine uncovered something obvious that had eluded me for a long time.

First a step through the looking glass, circa March 2001:

The Internet Wayback Machine has stashed most of the content of the original HongPong.com, as well as Thwart.net, the other site I ran as a main blog for the first 1.5 years over at Macalester. Somehow I just never noticed the Wayback Machine had all this stuff. I seem to recall looking into it once before without finding much. But hey, whatever, here it is preserved forever! It did not collect the images from each part, but that's not a big deal compared with recovering the text of long-lost missives from Roy, Fatty, Frogisis and Mordred.

Here is most of the Wiki.hongpong.com that met an ugly end from another hard drive crash: this was a very cool page about the geopolitics of pipelines that died badly. It also doesn't have images but i still have those. I had lost the text until today!!



And here is one from Thwart.net around November 2002, just after Wellstone's death



Incredible. Well not really that incredible. But it's a really great find, which basically reverses most of the years of data loss. Furthermore, I have every intention of adding all these old posts to the Drupal system, so that effectively THIS incarnation of Hongpong.com will include all the ancient material. After all, while not operative continuously, this site has been in operation for a very long time in internet terms. Starting up in November 2001 definitely makes it one of the oldest blog-sites around. NewsPro, PHP-Nuke, Wordpress, Scoop, MovableType and today Drupal, Hongpong.com (and thwart.net, which I still own) have run on most of the systems, usually on home-brewed server setups that only catastrophically die occasionally.

Also, for that matter, the hongpong.com I set up nearly seven years ago was actually organized pretty well, in many ways organized better than it is now. So a good swath of the old material will just get grafted right in, as top-level elements of the site design. You will be able to read the whole thing from November 2000 right through to today.

I haven't seen this in one hell of a long time:

AMAZING. And yes I am going to have to add the Groovy Penguins back in.