Update 10/10/05: Fixed a bug causing forum posts to be displayed in your journal. Added a "Category" line. Added code to use the first 50 characters of the post if there is no title. Added Eburg and Peons archives.
Click on one of the links above to view a list of all the journals or forums in the database. When you find your journal or forum, click on the name. Once the page has fully loaded, go to the "File" menu and choose "Save As" to save the archive to your computer.
The archives are in plain text, and contain the full contents of your journal or forum, including replies. They are formatted using the Movable Type Import Format. This means you can easily import your archive into another weblog program like Movable Type or Wordpress. Unfortunately, (as far as I know), Blogger and LiveJournal don't allow users to import entries. Still, the Movable Type format is well-supported, and as close to a "standard" format as there is, so if you find somewhere that lets you import entries, this will probably work.
Personally, I highly recomment Wordpress. It's free and open-source. It does everything that Movable Type does (not to mention everything that hatelife and killingmachines ever did), and generally does it faster. If you have access to a web server, it's well worth your time to install Wordpress. Plus, the installation only takes five minutes!
Many thanks to Miles Johnson for all his hard work producing these archive scripts to allow people to retreive their journals and forums.
Well, that's a long story, but what it boils down to is that the server that used to run KMorg fried itself, and the server that used to run Hatelife was shut down by the owner. In the year since that happened, Miles and I have tried to get the archives of both sites online, but have had many problems along the way. Finally, I've gotten the archive scripts working again, and some better web hosting, so I'm putting both site archives back online.
This is the archive site for the former weblog communities of Hatelife.org and KillingMachines.org. From here you can download a text file containing all your old journal or forum entries, as well as all the replies.
Read the directions above for full details, but basically, you just look up your old journal or forum, and download a text file archive of it. You can store this for your own records, or import it into other weblog programs like Movable Type or Wordpress.
I would love to say yes, but the Internet is too unsteady for me to say that with certainty. What I can tell you is that I have no intentions of switching web hosts anytime soon, and as long as I'm with my current hosts, I will keep these archives online. Still, if you want to be safe, you should download your archive files and back them up.
Probably not. I have no interest in running a site like KMorg anymore, and Steve made it pretty clear when he took Hatelife offline that he was done as well. However, some people have tried to start things up again, like the guys over at hatelife.net, who have set up a pretty accurate reproduction of old-school hatelife, and they allow you to import your old journal entries.
On Friday the 16th, sometime between midnight and 3 A.M., we had a power surge that caused the circuit breaker to trip, and we lost all power. The 10-minute battery on the UPS quickly drained, and I didn't hear the alarm from the bedroom. When I booted the server the next morning, it became obvious that it had been scrambled.
The server booted, but it said that it was unable to determine its domain name, and was using 127.0.0.1 instead. When I logged in locally, everything went slowly, and any network-related commands timed out. Trying to read man files gave a screen full of garbage, and pressing the arrow keys in any program resulted in error beeps and on-screen garbage.
Now, the problem was that I am not a sysadmin. I barely had a clue what to do when the server was running fine, and this was pretty far above my skill level. Common consensus among my geek friends seemed to be that the server would need to be reinstalled, which I was afraid of, because I didn't think I'd be able to get it back to the way it was configured before.
Further complicating things was the fact that none of the data had been backed up for several months. Frustratingly enough, researching how to set up a cron job to do daily and weekly backups was on my to-do list, and was probably going to get done in the next week or two. And since I don't know if reinstalling or upgrading the OS will wipe out files, my first goal had to be data recovery.
That at least went smoothly. I was able to run mysqldump to get a dump file of all the databases, and I was able to tar-gzip all the web directories, home directories and mail successfully. Then I was able to plug in a windows-formatted hard drive and mount it to recover the files (I had to do it that way because I had no network access). I archived those recovered files on two separate computers, and a CD backup, and I started looking for a place to host it.
Note: What follows is the original message I posted after getting back online. Since writing this, the server proved to be unrepairable, and I focussed on getting the archives online so people could recover their data.
What's next? Well, I'll be taking it slowly trying to upgrade or reinstall FreeBSD on the server. If I can get it working again, then I'll put it back up as it was, and KillingMachines and all the other sites will return shortly.
If I can't get it working again, then I'm probably still going to try to try for about a month to get some form of server set back up that can run KMorg. But if I can't get anything set up, then KMorg is probably going to be shut down. The site was built around the fact that it was running on its own server and had access to update the primary DNS records every 15 minutes, which is not something I'll be able to simulate on someone else's server.
I want to reassure you of two things:
However, I have to warn you all that this server has been a pain in my ass since the day that Steve abandoned it, and left me in charge of all the services that the server was providing. This is not a job I want, nor is it a job that I'm qualified for. While I will do everything in my power to put KMorg back up and safeguard people's data, everyone needs to remember that I'm having to do all of this in my spare time after working my full-time job. I'm not asking for sympathy, just understanding if it doesn't all happen overnight.
Thank you for your patience. I'll let you know through this page if anything changes here.
-- Scott Vandehey
Alright, first of all, I want to thank you all for your patience and encouraging words. It's been very helpful that through all of this, I haven't had a single KMorg user harrass me or demand that things get done faster, despite the fact that KMorg has now been down for a full month. In that time period, I've purchased new hosting, recovered all the user data from the server, and tried repeatedly to repair the server.
Sadly, the results are not good. I was unable to repair, upgrade, or even install a clean copy of FreeBSD on the server. It looks like the hardware is damaged beyond my ability to repair, and beyond my financial ability to replace it.
As you've probably already noticed, I've added my plan of attack to the top of the page. I'll be updating this list more frequently to give you all an idea of how close we are to being able to access your archived journals. My goal is to accomplish that this week, but I have to warn you that may not happen, depending on how quickly I'm able to write this PHP script in my spare time after work each day. But rest assured that I'm commited to getting the archived journalsup as quickly as possible.
On a side note, while trying to decide what format to put the journals in for easy recovery, I assumed I would format them for easy import into Blogger or LiveJournal. Much to my suprise, neither site allows users to import their entries from other journal sites. If you want to move your KMorg journal to either of them, you'll have to re-post your entries one at a time, and you'll lose all the replies for your entries. So what I'm doing instead is formatting the journals according to the Movable Type Import Format. If you've never heard of Movable Type, it's a powerful blogging program that you can install on a server. It's not really simple to install, but it has the advantage that you can import your journal entries (and replies!) from other journal sites. So I'll format everyone's journals to allow them to easily import them into a Movable Type account. If you don't want to use Movable Type, the import format is still clean and easy to use, so it'll serve you well regardless of where you put your journal contents.
Sorry, but this isn't working yet. Check back soon.
Maintained by: Scott Vandehey
Last Updated: July 04, 2008 9:19 AM