Time capsule
Long Live The Mixtape started in 2011, on Blogger. This is what it was, how it was put together and why it existed. Everything that survived from it is kept the way it was written.
The header, as the Wayback Machine caught it on February 6, 2016.
A sandbox
The site was a sandbox: somewhere to try things on the web, and somewhere to give away the mixes I was making to whoever wanted to listen. For a couple of years, 2011 and 2012 especially, a lot of people did.
How it was built
Blogger ran the posts. FileDen, a free file host that allowed hotlinking, did the job of a CDN: I deployed JavaScript there and pulled small apps into the pages, including a player for music videos I thought were fun. FileDen closed years ago, and what lived on it went with it.
The sidebar listed the projects, ran a live Scrobble feed from Last.fm, and wore the British record industry's 1980s "Home Taping Is Killing Music" badge.
The spindle
The plan was physical. I bought a spindle of a hundred CD-Rs, black on the back like a PlayStation disc, meaning to burn a mix onto each one. That's where the numbers come from: X-001 to X-100, one for every disc. Each mix was filed the way AllMusic files music, by genre, sub-genre and style, and some were built around one artist.
What changed
In 2015 I cleared the blog of what I called its promises of content: either I make something or I don't. The last mixtape that survives is X-024, from July 2015. The yearly Favorites, built from Last.fm data instead of by hand, carried on, and became the stations this site is built around now.
The .com lapsed and the site moved to .net, which is the address the Wayback Machine remembers. That lapsed too, and in 2026 I bought it back.
What survived
One page. The Wayback Machine's capture from February 2016 has the last three mixtapes, the introductions to three years of Favorites, and a post about a scrobbler for internet radio. They're here as they were written.