The docweasel.com site was/is huge. It was 10 years in the making, the efforts of dozens of contributors and several obsessed editors, of which I was one. I just don’t have that drive anymore, especially since the entire E/N scene which supported the site and gave it a raison d’etre is long gone. Who cares anymore.
The only reason I’m trying to get the most valuable parts back up is all the work the original crew did was great and deserves to be around as long as I have hte resources to keep it so.
And, in putting up the old stuff I’m finding real value, including that rarest of avis, material no available elsewhere on the web.
So far all I’ve gotten back up are a substantial amount of the MP stuff, starting with the TV shows, all the movies and lately the part that was never completed on the old site, the albums. While we originally did a lot of the transcribing ourselves, we did grab a lot from the old ‘stonedead.au’ site. However, I’m finding in doing the albums that transcripts of a lot of stuff has never been done, at least I can’t find it, and using the method of transcribing some of the missing stuff, then putting a long string of that transcription, including quotes around stuff I’m positive about, brings up nothing. This is pretty indicative of the fact these transcriptions just don’t exist.
So there’s that. Also, cross-referencing, formatting, displaying etc. takes a lot of time. Even though I can use a lot of the text include files verbatim after cutting out formatting stuff like tables and headers via mass replace, I still have to go line by line on every single sketch or track, scene, album, movie, season, episode etc to get it all right. The soundtrack and then the compilations remain, then I’ll decide on the newer stuff, like Eric Idle Sings, which I don’t find representative of the ‘classic’ period. I also don’t intend to get into the Gilliam movies, Jabberwocky, Fish Called Wanda the Michael Palin movies Missionary or Private Function, nor Yellowbeard etc. The 4 canonical movies are enough.
Next I’ll probably do comics, another area that is mostly archival (although originally it occasioned a marathon amount of scanning and cleaning up of images) and see where we are there. I think we did all the Cherry Poptart comix but hadn’t done some of the fab furry freaks, and those are just amazing. We also probably the only place to have all the red meats in one place. Fair use is hard to pin down these days, but we’ll give it a shot.
After that, we start getting into original work, at least tangentially. Our DOOM][ section used to be definitive, but so much stuff has been proliferated its just one of many. However, I still plan to put up what we had, walkthroughs for all Doom, Doom2 and Ultimate Doom levels, gifs, textures, utilities and original wads.
Then we have a lot of Stronghold stuff, including the most downloaded files on Stronghold Heaven, the premier SH site online.
Then the truly monumental task of the articles, reviews, interviews and original writing. I plan on using blog functionality to display/archive it, and I’ll try to replicate the dates based on file created dates, but those are iffy. What to keep and what to junk is going to be the big thing: what was funny or topical then isn’t now. All the political stuff, while interesting, is going out the window. Same with all the tit=baed articles. We used to write something about porn stars fucking for Peace in the Middle east just as excuse to include a bunch of naked girl pix. All that is out. Most of the movie and music reviews will stay, becasue that stuff is timeless. MP, I noticed and remembered, is folder 05 (saved a lot of coding time to put images there, even though I’ve ended up replacing almost 100% of the MP images). The old folder scheme used to be
00 frontpage articles humor and more, music and movies were usually front-paged at first then moved to their respective sections
01 comics spy vs spy, ffb, cherry redmeat – this will probably be changed to allow 1 to be for humor or other articles
02 links this will be eliminated, very old category that was useless even in the peak times, from the very very old angelfire or geocities site
03 games doom][ doom and stronghold
04 babes just hundreds of galleries of thousands of pix – this will all be junked. new regulations for info on models as well as hosting TOS make it impossible to maintain, even if I had the inclination, which I dont- the original erotic fiction of some of our old writers like gettoitt and Marie Claire might make it in, though.
05 monty python movie, tv, album transcripts and etc which is nearly done
06 nothing there is nothing for 06, can’t remember why? no html, txt or images, even a folder exists. They go 00 01 02 03 04 05 07 08 09. Weird, can'[t for the life of me remember why.
07 music
08 nothing no 8 either, which is really strange for reasons I won’t devulge. I think I had planned on doing a reorganizatoin at some point and set movies, the newest section, as 9 so I wouldn’t have to move them around later (always easier to have dummy high numbers, then move them down later)
09 movies reviews interviews articles minireviews news etc. UPDATE I remember, 08 was games, and still has a few in there. 6 is still a mystery.
after all the content is back up I’m going to recreate the forum, but that’s a lot of work so I’m going to get the content driven stuff first to draw hits to make the forum even worth it. Plus, the forum will probably be an ongoing thing so no use setting it up, ignoring it while I do the rest, then redoing it all. The Ikonboard perl-based forum is a non-starter, although it had a lot of great hacks, including many I and my partners coded in ourselves. I learned to write perl (for what that’s worth now) from that board, but it was just too slow, buggy and ultimately a major crash drove me to abandon it altogether, even though we still had hundreds of steady users who lived on the forum. Maybe some will return, wh knows.
So that’s where we are, I do this to help myself get a handle as well as inform whoever cares. See you in a week or so.