AOL-Files.com

I took a break from Rails this weekend to work on an old project.

AOL-Files.com was an AOL hacking website that a guy named BMB and I founded in 1999. I worked on it until about 2001, when I lost interest and started working on other things. Last week I checked it out on archive.org and got the urge to save a copy for myself.

Unfortunately, downloading a site from archive.org is not a trivial task. I tried some site copying software like GetLeft and HTTrack, but due to some peculiarities of archive.org, neither of them would work. I eventually had to write software to crawl and download the archive. Once I got that working (and it too about 15 runs to get it to go without errors), I had to go through one by one and clean up the files so they could be linked together.

And so it gives me great pleasure to report that a mirror of the site is up and can be accessed here.

The archive is not 100% complete for two reasons: 1) Archive.org doesn’t contain everything and 2) I don’t want to post anything that could get me in trouble with AOL. To make things easier, all of the active links are highlighed in yellow.

If you come across this and remember AOL-Files.com, please fire me an email and say hi.

Happy exploring!

14 thoughts on “AOL-Files.com

  1. Wow that is cool Matt. I can’t believe people are searching for it still after some 15 years or so. Nice to see some familiar names. Sure does bring back memories!!

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