WebSmurfer Revived: Smurfica Is Back, Baby

Yesterday, I revived an old site I originally built back in 1997.

Yeah, that’s old.

It’s been online continuously since it was built, which at this point is something like 28 years? I guess it depends on when in 1997 I built it.

But yeah; it’s been around a long time. Long enough to have been cited in an expert report in a Supreme Court case, discussed on a site called Government Computer News as an indicator of how much pointless jargon a government web site had on it and been threatened with lawsuits by the actual Smurf’s lawyers.

But it had stopped working.

The underlying tech of the web has changed a lot in the last 28 years, so the program that made other web sites look all smurfy was pretty dysfunctional; it couldn’t handle most web sites. So I found a more recent web proxy app, updated it a bit and added in the Smurfication bits and now it kinda works again. Sorta. For a lot of web sites, anyway.

Frankly, as long as it still works on the White House web site, I think it’s worth keeping up.

And yeah, it really works on the White House web site.