Going To Geek City In A  Go-Cart

(to be edited)

 I’ve been creating websites for over 25 years now. Initially these websites were basic HTML and then later I started to use blogger which was great at first because it was unique and then Google bought it and it is not as good. Then I started to use WordPress quite a lot .

WordPress produces dynamic sites. By dynamic I mean that the content is drawn into the viewers browser from a database the pages don’t really exist until they’re called up from a server when somebody types in the web address and there’s all sorts of interactivity such as commenting and feedback forms.

WordPress is extremely popular, powering up so many websites around the world. This means that it can be quite vulnerable to malware attack and have had loads of problems with this kind of thing. Now the issue for me is that I have lots of archive websites and that means an awful lot of security checking and monitoring and I’ve had several malware attacks over loads of sites. Sadly that means that I’ve had to lose the archive sites and this is a shame because they represent all kinds of adventures and projects from the past. Now I’ve embarked on a little project to try to present all these archive sites for people to look at but particularly for me to to look at from time to time. Perhaps it’s even a legacy I’d like to leave behind which I have to give some thought to because when I pop my clogs I will not be paying any hosting fees. The first step in this idea was to find a way to turn the dynamic database driven WordPress sites into static HTML. I found a way to do that using a plug-in called Simply Static. Once rendered into HTML files static HTML files can be uploaded to a server and are less likely to malware attack.

Now I have to go through the process of re-assembling sites which exist across several external hard drives. Some of them are broken and in disarray. What I’ve done to reassemble the sites is to install a XAMPP server on my laptop. This is a bit geeky but I managed to do it in old memories of the coding scripts is coming back to me. I’m not a coder but I’ve managed to to write code  by copying and pasting in and just trial and error. It’s quite exciting and interesting and reminiscent of the old days before content management systems existed. Some of my old archive sites are rich Gmail sites anyway with no dynamic content but even they have to be reconstituted and edited and to do. I’ve downloaded the free HTML editor called Kompozer which is pretty cool. I’ve also downloaded notepad plus plus which is just a little bit more has a few more features than notepad and I use that for editing code direct. 

So I’m creating local WordPress installs on my laptop using Apache, and phpMyAdmin just like the old days. It may sound geeky but it’s really not that hard and I’d be happy to show folks how to do it.

Now I need to dig up those old websites and get ’em back online