Archiving the ezblogs

[Sophira]

For a long time now I've been pondering the best way to archive the *.ezblog.co sites. The problem is that they're all WordPress sites and WordPress is notorious for having security holes, and I don't want to have to update everything all the time.

Today I came across this comprehensive post on how to convert a WordPress site to static HTML, and there's also an awesome script that can do almost all of it for you. At the core it's using wget to make a complete mirror, but it does a number of very useful things beforehand like closing comments on all posts (so you don't get non-working "new comment" forms in the archive) and such.

Unfortunately, there's a downside; the way it archives it is by changing the URLs to the posts, which means that just using the script on its own would create an archive where the existing links on the archived forums and such wouldn't work. For example, instead of somewordpress.com/?p=228 , you might have somewordpress.com/2014/09/06/this-is-a-post/ . Normally this is what you want (and we should probably have set them up like this for the ARG itself), but in this case I'm not sure that it is because of all the links.

I think I have an idea for how to get around this, however. If I set up the archive script right so that it would save to somewordpress.com/228-this-is-a-post.html or similar, I believe I should be able to make it so that a tiny script of my own will respond to the old URLs, find the new ones dynamically, and redirect you. While this will allow the old URLs to continue working, it does mean that the URL eventually displayed in your browser would not be the same as it was in the ARG.

I wanted to ask you guys whether this would be an acceptable solution? I know that the archiving of the ezblog sites is long overdue and I really apologise for it, but I am very concerned about possible security holes, as I'm sure you can imagine.

[narrativedilettante]

I don't understand all of that, but it sounds fine to me. =P

[Pixelmage]

I don't think a change in the links would be a problem. At most we might need to go into the timeline and fix a few links here and there; nothing a search and replace can't handle in a few minutes. And that's if your idea to redirect the old links into the new ones doesn't work as intended.

[Qara-Xuan Zenith]

I am not at all bothered by a change in urls / change in displayed url.

Also, I would like to have on the record once again that Soph is amazing and probably the best person.

[JRPictures]

Yeah I'm not bothered by the change in URLs either, whatever works best for you is fine with me.

Also, I would like to have on the record once again that Soph is amazing and probably the best person.

Agreed!

[Sophira]

I don't think a change in the links would be a problem. At most we might need to go into the timeline and fix a few links here and there; nothing a search and replace can't handle in a few minutes. And that's if your idea to redirect the old links into the new ones doesn't work as intended.

Well, my main concern was the links from the archived forum; the filter is just a generic domain-replacing filter, it wouldn't be able to change each link without a lot of work. So I definitely do want the old URLs to continue working if possible. (Or at least as much as they can; the old domains wouldn't work, but beyond that, sure.)