Friday, February 18, 2011

Oh, Hello (Again)

So, a pet project of mine this winter has been restoring the old Oh, Hello projects – Swanky, Scribble, Gbook.nu and Kick.nu – from a series of backup CDs I found.

So far, I’ve been able to extract out all of the backend scripts (yikes – how coding standards, two PHP versions and 10 years programming experience change things) and I’m working on rebuilding the MySQL data now.

The problem has been that:

a) These CDs are 10 years old.
b) There are 20 of these CDs
c) The backup tools I used were proprietary and the company is now out of business
d) The backup tools only work from DOS

So, I’m reaching out to some companies who do this sort of thing as a business. Hopefully they’ll be able to restore these CDs to a usable format that I can restore the data from.

Fingers crossed, I need to be able to make fun of the shit my wife used to post on her Scribble (and im sure the 100k+ users would also love to see their teen and tween ramblings ten years later).

Oh, early Internet, you were so sassy.

posted by Dustin Vannatter at 12:48 pm  

8 replies to “Oh, Hello (Again)”

  1. emr says:

    YES. to be honest, i have a few of mine printed out, but i’d love/hate to see the main one i used. so much nostalgia this week.

  2. katak says:

    Hi,

    I was one of the users of scribble.nu. I was only 20 years old back then. I have an account with a Chicago-based internet service provider now and if there is a need to share the bandwidth or something, I will be glad to help out with.

    For your information, I would like to retrieve my old postings made under the nick, putra80.
    Please keep me posted once your project of restoring the database is a success.

    Many thanks in advance.

  3. Emma says:

    Best of luck restoring the old Oh, Hello projects. I was also a Scribble.nu member, and was so sad to see it go … it’d be enormous fun to see a lot of old entries, should you restore Scribble.nu. 🙂

  4. burgs says:

    add me to the list of scribble/gbook users. would LOVE to see that content again. please keep us posted!

  5. psyche17 says:

    Meep! I have been hoping for this for many many years. Like dome of the others, I have a few old posts, but unearthing the majority of the entries would be like opening a time capsule. Ah. I hope you have success restoring the databases.

  6. Benn says:

    Oh good old Swanky. That’d be a nice blast from the past. Good luck.

  7. burgs says:

    bump.

    any luck?

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