The biggest problem is the ezblog sites - which is especially irritating because they're where most of the good stuff is, and I really want to bring them up.
The problem is that all the ezblog sites use
WordPress, and some even use different versions of WordPress. WP is known for being targetted quite often for exploits, and I don't want to have to stay on top of updating every ezblog site individually.
I could convert the sites to use HTML, but the URLs would then change, so links wouldn't work - which defeats the point of archiving it in the first place. The new URLs would be *friendlier* for sure (they'd look something like
http://westwitch.ezblog.twwf.info/116-r ... color.html instead of
http://westwitch.ezblog.twwf.info/?p=116), but unless the latter URLs redirected to the former, they're not much use. (And unfortunately the archive's URL filter won't help much here; even if I did take out the title from the URL so that they could easily be transformed, that's not going to help with my aim of allowing people to just be able to switch out the ".co" for ".twwf.info" and have it work.)
There are ways to get the URLs to redirect (whether noticeably or not) using scripting - and I'll use those if I can't think of any better ideas - but they're kind of hacky, basically involving looking through all the HTML files for a matching filename and using that. Also, it's not just the entry URLs that would need changed like that - the URLs for each month would also have to go through the same script. (Of course, converting to HTML would also completely disable any dynamic features on the site, but that's kind of the point.)
Basically, I have three main objectives, and any solution has to provide all three:
- Keep the visual style of each site as close to the original as possible.
- Allow access through the URLs that the old sites used, except for the ".twwf.info" substitution. (Bonus points if the URL that the user sees once on the site is the same as the one that would have been used during the ARG, though I suppose that's not absolutely necessary.)
- Be as free from vulnerabilities as possible, so that I don't have to worry about updating the software all the time.
I think I might try to code the script I mentioned. I'm honestly thinking that converting to HTML is probably the way to go.