everything old is new again

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English translations of 25 historical documents and 35 songs, each of which I'm only counting as 1 page even though they need to be displayable in French, English, or both side-by-side


• at least 3 ordered/numbered series of historical documents in varying stages of transcription and translation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