During the recent server turmoil I took the opportunity to enable some very robust error reporting.  I started noticing a few errors a day from Krakathoom's website, my old band.  I hadn't realized that it was getting any traffic until I looked at the source, which turned out to be a tiny piece of code I wrote nearly 10 years ago for my friend Jeff, who writes Velcrometer and was the bassist for Krakathoom.  What was this code, and why was it still running at all?

When Jeff started Velcrometer at Blogspot they didn't have a nice mobile interface.  He asked me if I could come up with some way to take the content from Blogspot and reformat it for a mobile screen.  Or I might have just done it, having bought an iPaq PocketPC.  Using ColdFusion 4 I scraped the pages, then parsed them for the current entry and the archive links by using the code comments in the page as reference points.  It worked rather well, especially considering he's got years of entries on there.

What I couldn't figure out was why Blogspot had never updated their code in the last decade.  I mean, HTML standards have come and gone since then.  CSS was a pipe dream.  Font tags were all the rage.  Picture this code with long hair wearing a dirty plaid shirt at a coffee shop listening to Kurt Cobain.  That's how old it is.  In internet years that's nearly 100.  

So wait, picture that code wearing a top hat at an absinthe bar listening to Gustav Mahler.

Eventually the band broke up and I forgot all about it until the server upgrade, and spotting the errors.  For code that's a decade old, a few minor errors is pretty interesting.  I could fix it, but then the code wouldn't be a decade old anymore.  That code has lasted through three hardware and countless software updates.  Jeff never updated his Blogspot template and now that it's no longer even offered he wears it like a badge of honor.  

It's a good thing he never updated his template, or I'm sure the code would have stopped working immediately.