website updating, the profic one

[julesjones]

Having had a fit of enthusiasm about doing some updates on the fanfic website for Gauda Prime Day, I have carried on and done some tweaking to the profic one, which hadn't been updated for [mumble] years either. So far it's mostly "I Aten't Dead", but in the course of this I decided that I should probably upload the fragments of the Syndicate honeymoon story that got written before Alex fell off a health-related cliff four years ago. It's never going to get finished, and the whole series is now OOP anyway, so fans who would like to see even a fragment might as well have the chance to. Trouble is, I don't seem to have more than the first 1400 words and some scribblings about the proposed plot (yes, it did have one), and I know we had more scenes written than what I've got. It's not in Google Docs, so the only known copy of the later bits must be on Alex's hard drive. From 2007. Which could be... problematic... I need to rummage in the Skype chat files and see if I can get that far back, and my mailspool.

It's rather weird hand-coding full HTMl after doing some fairly intensive work recently on two sites which will auto-format a lot of the HTML for you from your plaintext, or let you wysiwyg-edit your html. I still think it's easier for later maintenance if you hand-code and do proper indenting and the like, but it requires more effort to set up, and certainly more effort to remember to put it all in, including the paragraph markers.

Having had the experience of setting up a WordPress-based site, I'm wondering about the feasibility of transferring the site to a WP-based system. But running it on my own site would require non-trivial ongoing investment of my time on keeping it secure, which would probably wipe out any gains on making it easier to create new pages and re-arrange existing pages.

Comments

[green_knight]

I spent a fair amount of the last couple of months learning Wordpress from the bottom up, and I would say go and make the move. I'll be honest and admit that I don't know much about the security aspect of it - I use a commercial provider and trust their arrangement - but it's just *so easy* to maintain.

I think the biggest advantage is that updating WP feels trivial - open any browser, point to the admin URL, and you're good. updating a static site involves an FTP application and an HTML editor and scrolling through a lot of code, and half the time I used to put it off.

[julesjones]

One of the reasons for doing the fanfic site was to experiment with using WP to build a website as opposed to a blog, on something that wasn't just a Noddy site but wasn't something I couldn't afford to muck up. Once I'd found a template that worked for me, I found it by and large fairly easy to use, with one exception -- the WP-hosted sites are so incredibly slow to refresh when you do something...

But for the profic site, I need to put it on my own domain, and that means I need to deal with the security angle. For which I need to talk to my hosting service, who happens to be a friend. :-) The other thing that concerns me is that I'm heavily into making a site accessible, specifically that it should be usable with keyboard commands only, because I know how bloody frustrating it is to navigate with Dragon on a site that uses javascript all over the place. So anything that makes a site unusable in Lynx is out, and I will have to make sure that I can do what I want using CSS only. I need to ask the screen-reader users how they find WP sites in comparison with static sites.

I mostly don't have a problem with updating the static site, because it's mostly, well, static. A new page gets added occasionally as something gets published, but most of the pages that once got updated regularly have been supplanted by LiveJournal and LibraryThing. What I think I might find WP good for is to refresh the CSS easily.


I also need to go and have a look at your new toy now that I'm home again and no longer camping on a flaky OpenZone connection. :-)

[green_knight]

A Wordpress template consists of HTML/PHP with WP specific queries; you can use as much or as little javascript as you want. (And if you want my menu code, give me a shout - it's pure CSS, and it won't break if you add subpages, where almost every single template I looked at failed - or it's Javascript, which I dislike.

If a static site suits your need, by all means build one, but I found that I wanted to at least use different header and sidebar and footer files so I'd have to add a link only in one place... and by that point, you're not far from a basic Wordpress setup.

(I've got a set of amendments to make to my site - but I still like it overall.