How this site came back

Mopkin.com ran from roughly 2000 to 2008 on ColdFusion, with the articles, message boards and user accounts living in a database on a hard drive that no longer exists. What you are reading was rebuilt entirely from the Internet Archive.

What survived

• 90 articles recovered with their full text, images and original line breaks.
• 90 more articles we can prove existed but whose bodies were never crawled. They appear in the archive in grey, with whatever the front page recorded about them — title, author, date, and often the opening line.
• 10 columns, their names and their authors.

Why some of it is gone

The old site was database-driven: every article was a row, served through article.cfm?id=N. A crawler only saves a page if it happens to follow a link to it, so the Archive captured whatever was on the front page the day it visited and missed the rest. Articles that scrolled off quickly between crawls left nothing behind but an index entry. Nothing can bring those back — but the index entry is itself a record, so we kept it rather than pretending the article never existed.

Old links still work

Every original mopkin.com/columns/article.cfm?id=N URL redirects to its new home, so anything that ever linked here still lands in the right place.