Hello World (Again)
Take a seat, kids. Story time.
The story of Eyejabber is pretty straight-forward and almost ancient history by now. As it states on the About page, we started Eyejabber to be our very own site for collecting the weird and wonderful websites, news stories, and “viral” videos. This was back when social media was in its infancy and YouTube hadn’t become the juggernaut that it is today. We even went viral ourselves once for a post about the Kobe Bryant rape accusation. As it turned out, it doxxed the wrong person - oops.
Eyejabber launched 25 year ago today on October 12, 2001. The site went through a couple of evolutions, namely it started on PHP-Nuke and had some really great features like forums and a real-time chat feature. We had a couple of live chats going a couple of times a week. That’s how we found out our post went viral, an actual report showed up in the chat to question us about it.
At some point, PHP-Nuke was no longer being maintained or we stopped keeping up on the patches. The site was being defaced a couple of times a week. We’d restore the database and keep going. It was then that I took export of the stories and saved them to use with a WordPress importing tool. That was in 2009.
The site was moved to WordPress and continued on for a while, but most of us had moved on with other projects, careers, and other real-life responsibilities. I stepped away from posting and handed the reins over to Dudemac.
Fast forward 16 years. I spent most of those years on raising my kids, going through a divorce and remarrying, having a career, and starting a business which now consumes most of my time.
I also spent a lot of time building up a homelab, getting really into amateur radio and self-hosting my own cloud services. I also spent a lot of time scrolling and arguing with people on Twitter/X and that’s how I would scratch that itch for political discussion, rants, and finding weird stuff to share with people.
Up until recently. I was banned for “inauthentic behavior”. I have no idea what that means other than someone reported my account as being a bot. I made two appeals which were instantly rejected and there definitely wasn’t a human-in-the-loop on this one. Here’s the thing, every post and every comment and ever action was taken by me. Never once did I use a bot or AI with my X account.
Anyway, I sulked and got mad for a while but then I remember the lessons from self-hosting cloud services. I’ll just do it myself and take back the power from Big Tech.
Then I remembered Eyejabber and decided it needed a new life. Both as an archive of everything that came before and as a repository for a whole new world of eyejabbing.
So, the site as it is today is a little bare, but that’s going to change quick. It’s a functioning site and all of the original PHP-Nuke posts have already been imported in draft mode. I want to take some time to review each one and mark any broken links as broken or try to find a new link to the old content. If not, it can still serve as a museum.
The 2009 to 2012 (post-WordPress conversion) may or may not be lost. If I can get an export of the WordPress database, I should be able to recover most of them. If not, there’s always the Wayback Machine pages.
It might take a few months to get through the 2,636 posts currently in draft and get them posted. Then I have to figure out if it’s worth trying to recover the remaining missing posts.
Until then, the new content will be slowly trickling in, but I do plan to post new stuff as I have time.
- Lachlan (formerly known as Lynx)
P.S I’m also resurrecting the Eyejabber subreddit, r/Eyejabber, at least until they ban me too.