Twenty (!) years after launch, Mixtape Collective finally gave up the ghost.

A few weeks ago, I got an automated alert from a friendly server robot telling me that the site was unable to boot and that the robot would be turning it off. The code, which hadn't been touched since 2013, could no longer run. Too old. Too out of date.

Even though the community is gone and the internet has moved on, simply deleting everything would feel bad. Fixing it properly would require unreasonable amounts of time. Thusly, I opted to extract every morsel of data from the database, builing a long-term archive that isn't dependent on 20-year-old tech.

I built a program to take the code + database and build a static, read-only version of the site. Crawling every user, mixtape, forum post, etc we're able to build a complete archive of the site, using original assets, styles, designs, etc.

My initial goal was to keep things one-to-one, but as I was working through things, I realized that while I'm in the guts, I might as well make it a bit easier to navigate, easier to explore, easier to surface interesting data etc. To that end, I made a few precision tweaks:

• Search: created a simple search page that can find users, mixtapes + forum posts. Neat.
• Mixtape Central: reworked to highlight the best-of-the-best. Keyword-based browsing.
• User Central: reworked to highlight the best-of-the-best
• Music Central: new section to highlight artist / album / track info from our database.

Consider this my love letter to the community. I'm sorry I squandered what we built together. If I could do it over again, I would make different choices, keep the good times going. I miss you guys.

I doubt anyone will ever see this, but in the off chance one of you stumble across this, drop me a note!

Thanks. I love you all.

<3 EFF