shinelikethunder

so there's this absolute relic of a Les Misérables fansite I created in raw HTML in Notepad back in 2006, converted to Wordpress circa 2013, and lately I've been haha-only-half-jokingly threatening to turn it back to static HTML. because maintaining a highly customized and ancient Wordpress installation is a pain in the ass, and because a pile of plain text files with images is both more portable and waaaay smaller/easier to host than any database-backed nonsense.

and also because I'm a nerd who likes to do shit like this just for fun.

so tonight I took a look at how much work it would be to do it by hand and re-roll my own HTML. ladies and/or gents, this stupid fan shrine that's old enough to apply for its own learner's permit contains:

• 200 pages, give or take


• my French->English translations of 25 historical documents and 35 songs, each of which I'm only counting as 1 page even though they need to be displayable in French, English, or both side-by-side


• at least 3 ordered/numbered series of historical documents in varying stages of transcription and translation


• 20ish photo galleries totaling over 1000 images (public domain or my own photos)


• 6 sections, 12 subsections, and a couple of galleries under those


• metadata for 32 cast recordings, juuuust heterogeneous enough to resist automated organization


• at least 17 primary-source PDFs


• 3 dumb Javascript doohickies


• 1 moderately cool PHP doohickey that Wordpress hates


• 1 timeline in the form of a giant honking HTML table, which most CMSes including Wordpress hate


• 2 subdomains, for a static forum archive and a crowdsourced-annotations wiki, both of which can be more-or-less left alone

i have looked at static site generators. i have concluded that unless your goal is "a needlessly arcane way to create a very basic blog," static site generators are either: (a) toys, or (b) monstrous black holes of pointless fiddling and systematizing that programmers use to nerd-snipe themselves into more programming. ( in other words... toys. )

so. do I really want to re-wrangle 200 individual pages by hand, even if I can probably crib like half of them from my archive of the old static site? alternately, do I really want to fuck around with a Wordpress exporter, and do 200 pages of data cleanup on all those special characters when it inevitably shits the bed?

or, the real question: would re-wrangling all that shit be more or less of a pain in the ass than continuing to do Wordpress administration, indefinitely, with all the security risks / annoyances / broken obsolete plugins that entails, for what amounts to a pile of static pages anyway?

...the other thing I did tonight, and the reason the page count is only 200, is I created a little no-script CSS/HTML thing for toggling between original/translation/side-by-side views within the same page. which probably points to what my answer will end up being--but even if it doesn't, man, I wanna use the shit out of this somewhere.

"flippant account of 2000s forum drama that was some batshit insane cloak-and-dagger shit but also, ultimately, completely harmless"

like the nutty Hungarian chick who flounced/got banned for being kind of an asshole with a dubious sense of boundaries, and then proceeded to come back under at least three different sockpuppet identities (with elaborate profiles on other sites!), purporting to be an Irish lesbian, a Polish circus performer, and a Berlin cop, all with suspiciously familiar writing styles... no one could prove anything, not even when one of the German regulars tried to chat up the "cop" auf deutsch and failed to elicit a non-babelfished response, until the "Irish lesbian" got her ass busted helpfully pasting search results from images.google.hu

or the clown-on-clown, tween-on-tween, spy-vs-spy hijinks that ensued when some idiot script kiddie got banned, declared all-out vendetta, kept making obvious alt accounts to post grandiose capslocked gloating about how we were all dead meat, and only crawled off with his tail between his legs after an elaborate sting operation to make him think he'd "hacked" a global moderator's account--which in actuality was a newbie account one letter off from the correct username, whose avatar / display name / signature / stars were set up to look identical

or, hell, the ignominious decline of the musical-theater bootleg trading community after it managed to spontaneously reinvent copyright for me but not for thee

this is the kind of low-stakes quality WTFery that fandom just barely ever seems to get anymore, due to whatever combination of social media being a formless hellscape + "moral posturing about painful, deeply unfunny issues of mass injustice" becoming the basic currency of every trivial online-clout pissing contest + Facebook et al eroding the "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog" of it all and bringing widespread credible doxxing risks into the mix. the wank coming out of Discord servers has been approaching forum-drama levels of bizarre and elaborate, but the likelihood of someone getting hurt IRL just seems to be... so much higher at all times. and meanwhile, Twitter is remarkable only in having so much drama and managing to make all of it soul-suckingly unfunny.