ftowa.com was the website I ran for the FTO Drivers Club - Western Australia, a small Perth car club for Mitsubishi FTO owners that was active from about 2002 to 2006. Twenty years on, I’ve put the whole thing back online as a read-only static archive at ftowa.allanson.org.

The original site was hand-built: table layouts, <font> tags, a one-line stylesheet, and a Perl CGI membership system that handled joining, the member directory, member profiles, and a contact form. It ran on Windows/IIS, with a phpBB forum bolted on. The archive preserves all of it - every page, the photo galleries, a dozen workshop articles, the event and motorsport write-ups, all thirteen member profile pages, and the full forum.

Most of that survived the move to static hosting untouched. Plain HTML, CSS and images just work when you point a static server at the directory. The forum, however was a little more work.

The forum was a snapshot you couldn’t navigate

The forum had been captured at some point as around 9,000 pre-rendered HTML files, one per URL. I don’t even remember how or when I did this. However I did it, the mirroring process folded the original PHP query string into each filename, with ? replaced by @:

viewtopic.php?t=675                 ->  viewtopic.php@t=675.html
viewforum.php?f=1&start=50          ->  viewforum.php@f=1&start=50.html
profile.php?mode=viewprofile&u=2    ->  profile.php@mode=viewprofile&u=2.html

The files were all there. The links inside them were not. phpBB renders every internal link as a live PHP URL, so each archived page still pointed at things like viewtopic.php?t=675 and index.php, which 404 the moment there is no PHP interpreter behind them. The result was a complete snapshot of the forum that you could not actually read, because every link between topics, every page of pagination, and every “view latest post” button led nowhere.

Splicing the links back together

The fix was a bulk rewrite across all 9,092 files. For each internal forum link, convert it from its live .php?... form into the @-filename .html form that actually exists on disk, and rewrite the bare index.php to index.html so the forum index resolves. After that pass, topic-to-topic links, pagination, member profile links and the latest-post links all resolve. You still cannot log in or post, because there is nothing to log in to, but you can read the entire forum end to end.

The same pass handled the rest of the housekeeping:

• Domain rewrite. Every http://www.ftowa.com reference became relative to /.
• A Windows-ism in messageboard.html. An image path written with backslashes (\images\jcars.png) that browsers never resolve, fixed to /images/jcars.png.
• Malformed mailto links in the workshop articles, where the byline read <a href="[email protected]"> rather than a real mailto:, turned into genuine mailto: links.
• Relative CSS paths in the scraped-news fragments, where css/mainStyle.css needed to become ../css/mainStyle.css to resolve from their subdirectory.

What I deliberately left broken

The interactive features were Perl CGI, and CGI does not run on static hosting. Joining, the member list, editing a profile, the contact form - they all 404, and that is by design. Rebuilding them as static equivalents was tempting, but a reconstructed member system is not the site as it ran, and the point of an archive is fidelity, not a working clone.

One constraint ran through all of the editing: the entire site is iso-8859-1, declared in the page meta, with Windows line endings in places (back in the day…). The bulk edits left the bytes alone except for the targeted substitutions because No way was I going to invest time in converting to UTF-8.

Where it lives now

It runs on GitHub Pages behind a CNAME at ftowa.allanson.org, with a custom 404 page built in the original site’s style so that even a dead link lands somewhere that looks like the site. No build step, no framework, no redirects to paper over the dead CGI links. The repository root is the web root, which is what the site’s absolute paths (/css/..., /images/..., /html/...) expect.

Over time the content in this archive has diminishing utility. The Mitsubishi FTO was never a hugely popular car, and as of writing there are only 33 remaining registered in the UK, but keeping it around as a historical artifact might be useful in some capacity, for someone. If that someone ends up being you, feel free to reach out and let me know!

The archive is live, and the source is on GitHub.