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shinelikethunderso 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:
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. basically, if you're doing anything interesting with it, no amount of metadata gymnastics, configuration, themes, or plugins will make the damn thing do what you want out of the box.
(hilariously enough, the only SSG that could come close to tackling my--again!--stupid Les Misérables fan shrine from 2006 is named... wait for it... Hugo. it is a wonderful & complex piece of software for people who love custom taxonomies. I have wasted many fun hours playing with it. and last I checked, there was still NO good way to create an ordered series in it.
no usable plugins. no workable StackOverflow hacks. no way to roll your own taxonomy with a custom ordering that Hugo will respect, or will even let you put to meaningful use via the templating system. I would've had to learn Go programming and dig around in this app's eldritch internals, just to monkey-wrench it into doing the very first thing any nerd with a collection wants to do with a static website! truly the ironclad paradigm of The Blog and The Feed and the single reverse-chronological Content Stream is a curse upon the information age.)
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.
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. basically, if you're doing anything interesting with it, no amount of metadata gymnastics, configuration, themes, or plugins will make the damn thing do what you want out of the box.
(hilariously enough, the only SSG that could come close to tackling my--again!--stupid Les Misérables fan shrine from 2006 is named... wait for it... Hugo. it is a wonderful & complex piece of software for people who love custom taxonomies. I have wasted many fun hours playing with it. and last I checked, there was still NO good way to create an ordered series in it.
no usable plugins. no workable StackOverflow hacks. no way to roll your own taxonomy with a custom ordering that Hugo will respect, or will even let you put to meaningful use via the templating system. I would've had to learn Go programming and dig around in this app's eldritch internals, just to monkey-wrench it into doing the very first thing any nerd with a collection wants to do with a static website! truly the ironclad paradigm of The Blog and The Feed and the single reverse-chronological Content Stream is a curse upon the information age.)
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.