Between 2009 and the end of 2012, I was deeply embedded in the global street art scene. During those peak years, my blog, urbanartcore.eu, grew into one of Europe’s primary digital hubs for graffiti and urban art culture. It was a daily log of a specific era of hype, documenting the movement as it exploded across walls from Berlin to Bristol.

After 2012, the project sat stale. It remained online, a silent archive of that era, until 2016.

Then, it went dark.

I lost the domain. There is no complex story behind the loss—just human error and distraction. I missed a renewal window, the domain lapsed, and it was quickly snapped up by someone else. Just like that, years of documentation vanished from the web.

The Digital Excavation

For a long time, I assumed the content was irretrievable. However, I recently booted up an old laptop and found what I was looking for: a final, somewhat chaotic backup. I had a raw WordPress SQL dump and a folder of static assets.

I realized I didn’t want to just “relaunch” a blog. I wanted to build an archive. Restoring a heavy, vulnerability-prone WordPress installation for static content didn’t make sense. I wanted speed, security, and permanence.

The Modern Stack

The goal was to transform that dated, messy database into a clean, future-proof structure. I decided to move the infrastructure to Hugo, a static site generator, and host it via the European-based BunnyCDN.

The migration process involved:

  • Extracting the data: Pulling text and metadata from the SQL dump.
  • Refactoring: Converting HTML content into clean Markdown files.
  • Asset Management: Re-linking thousands of images to the new static structure.

This is where the timeline comes full circle. While the content is from a decade ago, the restoration was powered by current tech. I utilized Python scripts alongside Gemini and Claude to handle the heavy lifting. The AI agents parsed the SQL, cleaned the formatting, and structured the Markdown files, turning a manual nightmare into a manageable, automated workflow.

A New Home for Old Paint

The old .eu domain is gone, likely for good.

But the archive is now live at urbanartcore.com.

It isn’t a reboot. I am not trying to recreate the blog as it was. This is a preservation project. It is a static snapshot of the street art world as it looked between 2009 and 2012, saved from digital oblivion and given a new, permanent home.