The MySpace Layouts

Ask me about MySpace and I’ll tell you I built dozens of layouts — the custom profiles everybody traded around in 2006, when “designing your MySpace” was a real skill you could have. I believe it. The trouble is that MySpace layouts were the most ephemeral artifact the web has ever produced: a wad of CSS and HTML pasted into a profile field, with the images and stylesheets hosted somewhere off-site. When MySpace went dark and the off-site host lapsed, the layout simply ceased to exist. There was never a file to back up.

So this is an honest exhibit. We went looking, hard, and what we can prove is narrower — and more fun — than the memory.

What we could not find

No layout files survive. Not on the NAS backups, not in any superterran.com capture, not under myspace.com/superterran (the Wayback Machine never crawled the profile — MySpace was notoriously crawler-hostile), and not under the handle superterran on any of the big layout-trading sites of the era (createblog, pimp-my-profile, mygen, and friends). The full search trail is kept privately with the archive. If the “dozens” existed as a public collection, they were published somewhere we haven’t named yet.

What we can prove

The one place MySpace left a fingerprint is the blog — Doug’s Secret Shrine, 2008 — which has a whole myspace tag. And it is unambiguous that I wasn’t just using MySpace; I was taking it apart. From a post literally titled “Screwing with MySpace…”:

I was playing with it last night, and let’s just say that I’ve got plans. MySpace is going to have some server-side niftiness that god didn’t intend it to have — if I’ve got to move my profile off-site to do it.

That is the whole MySpace-layout craft in two sentences: bend a profile to do things it was never meant to, and host the guts somewhere you control. The same post signs off by announcing I’d gutted my own Top 8 and friends list, leaving “in [their] place… a monument to the only thing MySpace does well… Music.”

The era voice holds up everywhere. From “Web 2.0: Is there no civilization left?” — filed, naturally, under Apps, Geek, Myspace, Star Trek — a perfect snapshot of the web I’d grown up on, right before it became the web I was ranting about:

…there was Tucows for freeware, there was download.com for shareware… there were “I hate Bill Gates” websites, Maddox’s site was updated weekly, portable computing was all the rage with “augmenting reality” through special headsets… and even though WiFi wasn’t invented yet, everyone as geeky as I was (according to the CGI hit counter, well above 43 people) was convinced that caching websites with some dirty 16-bit VB2 app would catch on because… well… we were idiots.

Why it’s here anyway

The layouts are gone, but the practice is documented in my own words: a kid in 2006 who treated a locked-down social network as something to be modded, who moved his profile’s insides off-site to get around the sandbox, and who could not resist re-skinning everything he touched. That’s the through-line of this whole museum — the LCARS Trek pages, the Tripod redesigns, the unused superterran.com skins. MySpace was just the same instinct pointed at the biggest canvas of its moment.

If you have an old MySpace URL of mine — especially a numeric myspace.com/####… friend ID — that’s the thread that unravels the rest. Until then, this is the honest record: made, hacked, and lost.