I killed my blog. Then 10 years later, I brought it back.
Little walk down the memory lane…
Some of you old farts might remember this place.
bongkersz.com.
The Flaccid Mind.
A stupid name for a blog where I spent an equally stupid amount of time writing equally stupid things.
I started blogging sometime around 2005. Back then there was no Instagram, TikTok, Threads or whatever shit people are using nowadays. Facebook wasn’t even a thing for most of us yet.
We had blogs. And we actually READ other people’s blogs. Imagine that.
You wrote 1,500 words about what you ate for lunch, uploaded five badly compressed 640×480 photos, and somehow 30 people would leave comments. Those were the days. Then somewhere along the way, life happened.
Blogging slowed down. Facebook came. Twitter came. Everything became shorter and faster. The blog eventually went dormant. And at some point I managed to lose the bloody website itself.
Not just stopped updating it.
LOST IT!
Database. Files. Images. WordPress installation.
Gone.
Fuh!
Actually I did not renew my domain and hosting lah at one point because at that time I was thinking like – what’s the point? But as time passes and people grow old (you lah!) then that nostalgic feeling of having things you used to love, memories from the past, shits you spent long hours and efforts creating and making, then I decided to at least try to recover some of it back. But even then I consistently putting it hold, just doing some searches and downloads, then saved some files. That’s it.
For years, bongkersz.com existed mostly as scattered remains across the Internet. Some posts were still sitting on an old WordPress.com account. Some were preserved by the Wayback Machine. Images were scattered across Flickr, Photobucket and other long-forgotten image hosts. There were old WordPress XML exports here and there. Some pages survived in web archives. Some links pointed to websites that haven’t existed for more than a decade.
Basically an archaeological site. Then in 2026 I had this brilliant idea: Why don’t I rebuild the whole farking thing?
How difficult could it be??
Very.
Very farking difficult.
At first I thought this would be straightforward.
Find the old WordPress export.
Import it.
Download whatever is available from Wayback Machine.
Done.
Bwahahahaha!
No.
The first problem was figuring out what actually existed.
Different backups contained different versions of the same posts. Some exports had articles that others didn’t. Some articles had titles but incomplete bodies. Some had comments. Some didn’t. Some posts existed in Wayback but not WordPress.com. Some existed in WordPress.com but had broken images.
Then there were duplicates. Lots of them. Even I got confused which one I should use.
One archive might call something Post A while another archive contained what looked like Post A but with slightly different HTML, comments or metadata.
So simply merging everything would create a Frankenstein blog full of duplicated posts.
Which, naturally, is exactly what happened during some of the early recovery attempts.
Shit, this kind of crap is damn annoying!
Then things got serious
What started as “restore my old blog” slowly became a proper digital archaeology exercise.
I gathered everything I could find:
Old WordPress XML exports.
The surviving WordPress.com copy.
Wayback Machine captures.
Firecrawl recovery data.
Archivarix archives.
Old media folders.
Recovered HTML.
Several partial recovery packages produced during earlier attempts.
Then we started comparing them against each other.
Post by post.
Title by title.
Date by date.
URL by URL.
Comment by comment.
Image by image.
The early exhaustive audit suggested there were 74 missing post slots.
Important distinction here: we didn’t actually know what those 74 posts were.
The archive counts told us something had existed in those positions, but most had no trustworthy title, date, permalink or article body.
So I refused to simply manufacture 74 articles and pretend they were recovered.
If I wrote some rubbish in 2009, I wanted my original 2009 rubbish.
Not newly generated 2026 rubbish pretending to be my 2009 rubbish.
I think I went at it seriously this past one week, after that one tweet sharing about Nokia N900, comparing it against the newly launched iPhone Duo, I was so excited that I reposted it and looked up my old blog post on N900, which you can read about it here! Of course I got it from Wayward Machine and I just suddenly so motivated to put more work into the recovery. With whatever I managed to salvage, I went and registered a new bongkersz.com and bought hosting, install WordPress and huarghhhhhhhhhhh!
Then we hit gold
The breakthrough came when additional archive material was recovered.
Suddenly we could compare much more of the original site against the reconstructed WordPress database.
And things changed dramatically.
We recovered 30 genuine posts that were completely missing from the previous master.
Real titles.
Real dates.
Real permalinks.
Real archived article bodies.
Posts from April, May and June 2009 appeared again.
Things like:
“Ani O’hev O’Tach, Gal Gadot!”
“Experience Lomorgasm!! Get your Lomo now!”
“Breaking News: Nizar is the legitimate MB!!”
“I killed my blog”
“Fuck you”
“My A-Z & Selamat Hari Gawai Dayak!”
And, appropriately enough:
“Wash your hands too!”
YoohooooO!!
Even better, 72 article bodies that had previously been reconstructed or editorially filled could now be replaced with genuine archived HTML.
That was important to me.
The objective wasn’t to make bongkersz.com look complete.
The objective was to make it authentic.
If something couldn’t be recovered, I’d rather admit it was gone than quietly invent something to fill the hole.
543 posts
After all the archive reconciliation, we discovered another problem.
Duplicates.
Thirty-one duplicate export records were identified and removed during the major reconciliation.
The resulting recovery master contained 543 historical post records.
But even that wasn’t quite the end of it.
After browsing the revived site manually, I noticed several articles that looked suspiciously familiar.
Same post.
Slightly different title.
Same date.
Different archive version.
More checking eventually identified another seven redundant historical records that had escaped the automated duplicate detection. Those are now sitting harmlessly in the WordPress Trash while the better published versions remain online. The live archive currently has 535 published historical posts, plus two strange old blank/unfinished drafts that I’ve decided to preserve because, well, they were there.
One of those drafts contains only a tiny image/smiley fragment.
The other is an unfinished piece from June 2009 about the USM student-intake controversy.
I’m leaving them alone.
Digital fossils.
And then there were 6,904 comments
Remember when people actually commented on blogs? The recovered database currently contains 6,904 comments. That number itself became another investigation because the recovery master reported 6,914.
Ten comments missing?
Another recovery failure?
Nope.
After digging through it, the discrepancy could be explained by duplicate/redundant records and old unapproved spam comments.
One article, “Bloggers Unite!”, for example, had old comments containing obvious automated pharmaceutical spam.
Viagra. Cialis. Tramadol. Xanax. HAMIKLANJIAO???
All the wonderful things apparently required to operate a Malaysian blog in the late 2000s.
My old blog had been infected with crap!
During the final integrity audit we found hidden display:none blocks buried inside dozens of old posts.
Pharmaceutical spam.
Viagra, tramadol, hydrocodone, Cialis, Xanax and friends.
FIFTY-THREE contaminated records eventually had to be cleaned. The spam was removed while preserving the actual articles.
Then the WordPress installation itself was checked. 3,338 WordPress core files verified.
No modified core files.
No missing core files.
One mysterious wp-admin/error_log remains outside the normal WordPress core set. That’s being treated separately rather than randomly deleting things and praying nothing explodes.
Then came the images
This might actually be the most tedious part.
A blog from 2005–2013 depended heavily on external image hosting.
Flickr. Photobucket. Random websites. News sites. Image hosts that probably died before TikTok existed.
Some images survived.
Some didn’t.
So instead of continuing to depend on those ancient external URLs, we’re now recovering the surviving originals and bringing copies home to bongkersz.com.
One by one.
An old Flickr image from my “I am going bald for Go Bald campaign! Wheee!” post?
Recovered.
Five Flickr photographs from “Experience Lomorgasm!! Get your Lomo now!”?
Recovered.
Old Chinese New Year photographs?
Recovered.
Sibu photographs?
Recovered.
Old cooking photos?
Recovered.
My old cute-kid photos?
Yes.
Unfortunately recovered too.
Dozens of those images have now been downloaded from their surviving original locations and stored locally inside bongkersz.com. Some cannot be recovered because the original servers simply don’t exist anymore. And that’s where I draw the line. I’m not going to put some random photograph there just because it looks vaguely similar.
If the original is gone, it’s gone. Maybe another forgotten backup will surface someday. Who knows? Nothing is really missing in the internet of things.
Even the URLs needed archaeology
Thousands of references still pointed to:
https://bongkersz.com
instead of HTTPS.
A database-wide cleanup corrected 2,343 references.
Then we found old internal links using WordPress’s ancient:
?p=69
type URLs.
One was even:
http://https://bongkersz.com/...
WTF.
Those have now been traced back to their actual posts and changed to proper permanent URLs.
The internal-link audit currently shows zero remaining malformed or legacy bongkersz references of those types.
How long did all this take?
This is where it gets ridiculous.
The serious recovery effort ran through several rounds rather than one sitting.
The major recovery push in September 2026 alone stretched across multiple days, with repeated six-minute, ten-minute, half-hour and much longer recovery/audit sessions, plus archive crawling and automated processing running between them.
There were earlier recovery attempts before that as well.
I don’t have an honest stopwatch total for the entire project, so I’m not going to invent one.
But measured in human attention, archive processing, repeated audits, imports, corrections and checking hundreds of posts and thousands of comments, we’re comfortably talking many tens of hours of work.
And we’re still not completely finished.
At the time I’m writing this, we’ve actually hit the daily limit on one of the WordPress recovery tools while migrating the remaining historical images.
Very appropriate.
Even the machines are tired of bongkersz.com.
So… is bongkersz.com finally recovered?
For the posts?
Yes.
As far as everything currently available to us can establish, the historical post-recovery project is complete.
There are no manufactured article bodies remaining.
There are no known mystery placeholder posts waiting for somebody to make up their contents.
What could genuinely be recovered from the WordPress exports, Wayback captures and later archive packages has been reconciled.
The media preservation work is now in its final stages.
After that we’ll freeze a proper preservation copy of the restored site.
Then comes another problem. Making this ancient bastard work properly on modern devices. It already works rather nicely on most screens. Then I opened it on an iPhone 17 Pro.
Of course something had to look wrong. Cheebuy iOS. That fight is for another day. For now, though…
Seeing posts I wrote nearly twenty years ago appearing again, together with the stupid jokes, broken English, photographs, arguments and thousands of comments from people who wandered through this little corner of the Internet…
Fuh!
It feels strange.
In 2008, after recovering access to an even older version of this blog, I apparently wrote:
“I am freaking estatic! I am so farking happy!”
Eighteen years later…
Same feeling.
bongkersz.com is alive again.
The Flaccid Mind refuses to die.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!
ps: Of course, I have my new assistant to thank for, helping me greatly with the recovery. Just $20/month.
pps: Yes. 10 years. Last post I wrote was in 2016, during the Sarawak State Election. Then I wrote a post in 2018, a feeble attempt at trying to write something again on a new WordPress.com blog – hamiklanjiao.wordpress.com

