The Book of Ashes

The Perihelion 5 6:53PM

I'm feeling some feelings right now, a whiff of melancholy, a hint of sadness, a truck load of nostalgia.

After 23 years I finally let the Perihelion domain name expire. It's been hard to let go, all the memories, all the good times, but I can put it under a sub domain somewhere, archived, forgotten, left to gather dust in the shadows.

So I created the subdomain and shifted the site there. I noticed that its still recording bot visits to the user table (cause I wrote it before bots became 50% of visits) and thought I'd just tidy that up a little.

But you see, I have a new PC, it wasn't setup right, there were web.config issues, I hate that stuff. Its over 10 years old, I'd rather rewrite it in .net 8 than spend hours fixing that old crap.

So that was my first (mis)take. A new project, dump in the image folders, set targetted .net version to 8 and since I'm rewriting it I can tidy up a few things. Then I saw the savant pages, I'd only migrated myself and had lost all of my previous entries.

So that was my second. I just thought to myself, I could just scrape it from the Way Back Machine, restore the greatness and glory that once was. So I wrote the scraper, and sat, restarting it each time I hit the rate limits. A few scrapes later and I had Farmgirl and Sifty, The Crispy One was next then Pyskx, the forgotten mage, then me.

The savant archives restored I marvelled at how shit my HTML was back then, no class names or containing divs, tags without closing tags, a stream of HTML conciousness. It was a mess to scrape. But I got something.

But something is never enough. I had seen a hint of the glory that was, the Trillion Page Zone, and I knew it was just one scrape away. So once again I wrote another scraper, hit the pages, downloaded the random memory dump that was the Perihelion followers from a time long forgotten and shit, there it was, well with gaps where the WBM had hit issues, but mostly there.

And so here we are. I must draw a line and stop. Put this up in the archives for future historians to see. I figure there are enough posts from me to train a LLM at some point in the future to restore my younger self. A note to future people attempting this, please correct my spelling before you do, otherwise its going to be painful to communicate with...