Curse of AOL
I am not sure how many of my visitors browse the library of my old sites but anyone who does may have noticed numerous broken links in the StarCraft site.
The surprise might be that none of the images were actually missing. The StarCraft site was among the first web sites I ever made and my inexperience led me to use the cursed .art image format. Ever heard of it? The art image format is a propriety format developed by America Online for use in their software. By default (at least back in 1999) all AOL users were served art images in place of the actual image files. Not knowing any better I then used these art images on my own web sites. I never noticed the problem because the AOL browser was really a modified Internet Explorer browser – i.e. Internet Explorer 6 possessed the capability to display AOL’s propriety format.
Remember there was no Firefox back then!
Anyway, I never noticed when Microsoft released a security update last summer preventing art images from displaying in IE. My AOL days ended long, long ago so I suddenly lost the ability to view my own images. Indeed, I had always planned to convert the images back to a common format but suddenly it appeared to be too late.
The StarCraft site was the hardest hit, but in all three different sites of mine used at least one cursed art image. (not all of my sites are available in the library)
No more! Today I installed the free Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 and installed Windows XP SP 2 on my virtual computer. Lacking the security update from last summer, I was able to save all the art images as bit maps and then back on Vista complete the process by saving the bit maps as either jpegs or GIF’s. Yes, I realize that AOL’s art images are super compressed so a serious quality loss exists but my goal was to simply restore my archived sites back to how they originally were.
So enjoy my StarCraft site once again, now for the first time on non-IE browsers!