THE SITE IS UPDATED?!?!?!??!?!

One day I will update the web-site, I said. That was 2003. I would like the record to show that I never specified which day.

Here is the situation. Mopkin.com ran on ColdFusion — every column, every message board post, every terrible idea was a row in a database. That database lived on a hard drive. The hard drive is gone. There is no backup. There was never a backup. We were teenagers.

So none of this came from a backup. All of it was excavated out of the Internet Archive, one crawl at a time, and reassembled.

What came back

• 1,237 archived captures of mopkin.com, spanning 2001 to 2025.
• 180 articles we can prove existed — 94 of them with their full text, images and original line breaks intact.
• 10 columns: News, Petu & Patater, The Idea Men, Ask Dr. Knowledge, Captain Briton, Us and Them, Traveling, FW: Stuff around the internet, Lisa Corner, and The Cuban Carnac.
• 81 pieces of artwork — comics, column headers, the whole visual mess.
• The comment threads. Entire arguments, preserved. People planning trips in 2007 in real time.
• 267 blog posts from 2008–2011, which turned out to still be alive on Blogger the entire time.

What is gone for good

Some of it is not coming back, and it is worth being straight about why.

86 articles exist only as a title, an author, a date and an opening line. A crawler only saves a page if it follows a link to it, so the Archive caught whatever was on the front page the day it visited and missed the rest. Those entries are still listed in the archive, greyed out. They existed. That felt worth recording rather than quietly pretending they never did.

Find The Cheese! is gone. The launcher page survives — "Move using the number keys!", "(Only works in MSIE 4.0 or higher :( Sorry )" — but the maze itself opened in a JavaScript popup, and crawlers do not run JavaScript. Same reason the Othello game is gone: the board and all four of its AI opponents (Chaos, Greedy, Strangler and Edgy) ran server-side in ColdFusion. Only the setup form survives, offering you a game nobody can play.

That rule turns out to explain most of the losses. Anything reachable by a plain link survived. Anything you had to run code to reach did not.

Three sites for the price of one

Down at the bottom of every page there is a switch: 2001, 2003, modern. Those first two are not impressions of the old site. The stylesheets and the chrome were recovered along with everything else, so those views are the actual thing — purple tab strip and all.

The logo made it too. Both of them. The friendly blue one from 2001, and the one where he is extremely angry.

— Mopkin