Thirty video hosts later

How a 21-year-old WordPress multisite became four static pages under 10 MB — written in October 2026 by StuFF mc, with Claude.

When I retired Pomcast, the plan sounded simple: keep a list of the videos, drop WordPress, and put the whole thing on a small host that allows 10 MB of files. Getting there meant reading every post since 2005 — and finding out what happened to all the places those videos used to live.

Digging in the dump

Everything started from one file: a 104 MB mysqldump of the MariaDB database, 74 tables, one WordPress multisite with five blogs. Four of them mattered: pomcast.com in English, plus the French, Spanish and German sites.

There was no database server at hand, so a 40-line Python parser reads the INSERT statements directly. Only published posts count — WordPress keeps every revision of every post, which would have tripled the numbers. A YouTube video shows up in more shapes than you would think: watch?v= links, Flash-era /v/ embeds inside <object> tags, /embed/ iframes, youtu.be short links and three different [youtube] shortcodes from plugins long gone.

The graveyard

YouTube was never the only home. In 2007 the videos went to Revver, vPod.tv and Seesmic. In 2009 every episode was uploaded everywhere at once: #73 NSConference Day 2 was embedded from eleven different sites in a single post. Counting everything, the posts point to thirty video hosts. Here is what each one does today (checked on 12 October 2026):

Of thirty hosts, only YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo (partly), media.ccc.de and Koreus still play anything. The surprise is Dailymotion: every single 2009 upload is still there. The other surprise is YouTube going the other way for the oldest material — of the 16 YouTube videos linked in 2006, 11 have disappeared.

One trap worth sharing: Vimeo’s oEmbed API said “404” for three WWDC ’14 interviews that are perfectly alive on my account. Vimeo hides videos whose embedding is restricted, and its pages return “200 OK” even for videos that don’t exist. Those twelve had to be checked by hand in a browser. Then came the good news: comparing all 31 of my Vimeo videos with my YouTube channel showed that 23 exist on both. The three WWDC ’14 interviews had been on YouTube all along — the posts just never linked them — so they are now back on the English page.

The same search across all my YouTube channels found seven more: posts whose only copies were on dead platforms, but whose video I had also put on YouTube under another title — Don McAllister from ScreenCastsOnline, the PariSoma visit, the MacBook Pro 17" review and others. They are back too.

Not every video here is mine. Back then, a post often embedded someone else’s clip — a keynote moment, a TV interview, an ad. Those 50 videos still play, but they are shown in grey with the name of the channel they come from, so my own work stands out.

What survived, and what didn’t

The new pages list 154 YouTube videos. The 30 that are deleted or private stay in the list as grey “no longer available” tiles, so the archive stays honest about its holes. Everything else went into a to-do list: 111 episodes whose video doesn’t play anywhere anymore, 121 whose video survives only as a file from the old server (safe in my backup, waiting to go to YouTube), and 14 that still play somewhere other than YouTube. Most of those files were hiding in podcast metadata rather than in the posts themselves: in 2007 every episode came in up to four versions, one per device — Mac, iPod, iPhone and Apple TV.

Do you have an old copy? If you downloaded Pomcast videos from iTunes, blip.tv or the old shows.pomcast.com back then — the Macworld 2007 days, the 2009 NSConference interviews — please write to mc (at) pomcast.com. They’ll go back on YouTube and onto this page.

Lazy embeds

A page with 76 YouTube players loads 76 players. Instead, every video is a still image stored on this site, and the player is only injected when you click. YouTube’s own thumbnails are 4:3 with black bars for most old videos, so a small script fetches the best still, crops the bars away and saves a 640×360 WebP: about 16 KB each, 2.0 MB for all 124. Until you press play, this page makes no request to YouTube at all, and the player then comes from youtube-nocookie.com.

The theme, AJAXised in 2007

The original WordPress theme was built by Pof (Giovanni Olivera) on top of Vistered Little by Nik Iliadis: a starfield, black glass panels, amber links. Reading its source again was a trip: Prototype.js, script.aculo.us, FancyZoom, and pngfix.js to make transparent PNGs work in Internet Explorer 6. Each rounded panel was a three-by-three HTML <table> of nine PNG slices.

Those same nine images now form one 2.5 KB file used with CSS border-image. The live search, whose PHP backend had quietly died, is now about sixty lines of plain JavaScript: it filters as you type, ignores accents (“electrique” finds “électrique”), and keeps the query in the address so a search can be shared. No framework, no build step, nothing that needs updating in five years.

Old links keep working

Twenty years of blogs, forums and podcasts link to addresses like pomcast.com/2007/01/09/scoble/. Once WordPress is gone, those would all be 404s. A generated .htaccess file catches them instead: each of the 136 old posts whose video is on these pages sends its visitors straight to that video, highlighted, and every other old address — posts without a surviving video, categories, feeds, even /wp-admin — lands on the archive page in the right language. The podcast feeds are covered too: Apple Podcasts still lists the show, so every old feed address now serves one last episode — a goodbye — instead of an error.

The 10 MB budget

The new host allows 10 MB of files, so size was a design constraint from day one:

The starfield alone was 543 KB as a 3000-pixel JPEG; as a 1920-pixel WebP it is 101 KB and looks the same behind black panels. The build script refuses to stay quiet if the total ever goes over the limit.

Thanks

To Pof for the theme that framed all of this, to Vince for hosting it for so many years, and to everyone who uploaded, edited and watched along the way.

— StuFF mc