Blast from the Past

I was trawling my hard-drive this afternoon, reorganising, archiving, purging… when a folder titled “Urban Mainframe Screen Captures” caught my attention.

For some years I ran another weblog — a predecessor to the Perpetual βeta — called Urban Mainframe. At the end of its life it was, if I recall correctly, a WordPress-based site. But it started out running atop my own CMS, lovingly hand-crafted in Perl. I ran that site for around a decade, until a sticky financial situation meant that I couldn’t justify the fees and hosting costs it incurred.

Discovering these screen captures (taken just before the site went dark) took me by surprise, filling me with a deep sense of nostalgia and loss. I regret that I didn’t archive the site before it went offline. I regret that I lost 10-years’ worth of my writings, thoughts, opinions and hundreds of comments from my peers. Damn shame.

Anyway, for the sake of posterity, I’ve uploaded those screen captures — all that remains from my time with the Urban Mainframe — into my Camera Roll.