Return of the Underground Ozarks Blog (?)

[UOmoderators]

Greetings,

You may or may not remember the old UO blog but it is the most broken part of the site left remaining to fix. I spent all day on it yesterday and haven't made much progress in "resurrecting" the old one. It's pretty fucked, it's like a decade out of date and it doesn't help that I don't know shit about databases. And with that, the old gallery that was associated with it is also not functional and has a low chance of survival. I'll keep trying, but the prognosis is not good.

Does anyone care? How much time should be spent in trying to bring that content back to life?

I can tell you that personally the only thing I really remember about it was the infamous and legendary post "almost died at armour meat" wherein WR made a daring and insane climb up the smokestack. IMO, that post at least needs to be brought back somehow and enshrined forever on Underground Ozarks.


Return of the blog (?)

While trying out a variety of workarounds, I installed a new blog that works.

I then located the infamous smokestack climb thanks to archive.org and posted it to the new blog and, for now at least, you can find it here: https://undergroundozarks.com/blog2/ind ... rmour-meat

That was done by a manual copy and paste into a new blog post. It wasn't terrible but it would be very tedious trying to replicate all the old blog posts and.. I'm not sure it would be worth it. And yeah the formatting still needs work, but like all things php related, it's a tedious and not straightforward pain in the ass.

Theoretically, the old location entries could also be manually recreated in a similar fashion. And I do find some value in the old photos of locations from almost 2 decades ago now, some of which are long gone. But I mean who has time for all that?

Does anyone care?

Does UO even need a blog anymore?

We could easily just copy+paste the contents of that (or any other) blog post into a regular forum post and just remove the blog functionality altogether and call it a day. We could make a new subforum called "UO Blog" where those posts are re-created.

IDK. You tell me.

P.S. and FYI
If you follow the URL to the old blog you'll find the setup routine for the blog software. Such is the state as of right now/today anyway. If someone tries fucking with it, it's not going to do anything because it's a copy of the database. It'd be cool if nobody fucks with it, but even if you do it will only take a few seconds to import the backup database and get right back where it is now, so you won't accomplish anything.

[Snoopy]

Personally; I think it'd be better to have the blog archived in a locked forum as you proposed. It'll be less work on your end with no worries about figuring out the formatting and such. Also you won't have to update the plugin constantly and figure out why its broken later down the road lol. KCUrbEx had a gallery.... well.... remnants of a gallery in the files I received. The maintainers of that gallery plugin no longer updated it and there wasn't a possibility of rebuilding it with the rest of the forum. I was also missing a lot of the content that would need to be in there (like the photos lol). I tried the wayback solution but wasn't super successful as most of it was moved behind a login wall years ago.

At the end of the day, as long as your saving the information for future generations, who really cares about the "blog" feel. Surely the new blog software works differently than the old enough where it wouldn't be as nostalgic?

I really enjoyed reading the blog while it was around, and I wouldn't mind reading it via Forum format.

[Nicotti]

I +1 to Snoopy's post.

Also, I know a lil bit about databases, so maybe pm me?

[UOmoderators]

Yeah, so... ain't nobody got time fo dat.

I've copied the legendary WhiteRabbit/Armour story to the Saint Louis forum and the new blog will go the same way as the old blog.

Eventually, the UO index/landing page will also get a facelift (or just completely replaced by/redirected to the forum). It's unfortunate, but that front page has been nothing but dead links for like a decade now and I'm not sure if any of the content is worth any of our time. I hate letting OG content die off but it was broken long, long ago.

@Nicotti: if you feel differently I don't mind seeing if I can get you the relevant data and we'll see if we can make any progress, but it's definitely not at the top of my to do list right now.

[Nicotti]

@Nicotti: if you feel differently I don't mind seeing if I can get you the relevant data and we'll see if we can make any progress, but it's definitely not at the top of my to do list right now.

I'm cool with how you reposted WR's armour blog to the forum.

Except maybe make a new channel for them in the "Other" section (the OU Blog you mentioned before). Is it possible to limit the channel to where only you can create new topic threads but anyone can post comments on the thread? If not, I'd say lock the channel so only you can make reposts. That way the reblogs won't get buried in the forum and you don't have to pin them to the top.

[Nicotti]

What data am I potentially looking thru/for? I forget.

[UOmoderators]

What data am I potentially looking thru/for? I forget.

the old Blog database, but ain't nobody got time for that. The WR story was the important one, the rest is just lost forever and I think we can all live with that.

[Nicotti]

Oh. I'll look thru it.