Haven’t posted in a while about the state of the site, but I’ve been working on it. Replicating the blog, from 2002 (and before!) to 2017 was a chore. In 2002 the blog was just an shtml site with weekly (or so) updates.
Then it became a wordpress.com hosted site, something we never should have messed with. WP banned the site with no notice, no backup. The Internet Archive was only partly helpful in recovering posts, we got most of the important ones but a lot was lost or truncated (the archive tends to save monthly summaries instead of the individual posts). In 2008-2010 there was some overlap, but it became a docweasel.com domain hosted blog. The assholes at Dotster (NEVER USE DOTSTER! THEY ARE RIPOFFS AND BASTARDS!) took the site offline with no prior notice and no chance to back up the blog. We did back it up in 2010, allowing us to recover most of those years, and the internet archive was better at archiving the domain hosted site so 2010-2012 was recoverable.
2013-2016 is where the greatest loss lies. The crew had dwindled and scattered by then, the forum went down in 2012 and I didn’t have time nor inclination to get it back up, and I don’t think hardly anyone but me and my partner were posting in those days, mostly political thoughts. I also wrote during that time for New England Republican, I recovered some of those, mostly about immigration, a topic on which my opinion has shifted due to the excesses of the immigration lobby: I’m no longer on their side and a lot of those posts would no longer interest me anyway.
We’ve added many of Marie’s stories, but she was so prolific there’s a danger of the blog becoming dominated with mostly her stories, distorting the intent and content of the thing, so we are holding quite a few back until we decide how to handle them. Maybe a section of her own would have been more appropriate, maybe we’ll do that later.
Anyway, I added another Python record, Total Rubbish, the 10 LP collection. Looking at the ones left, Ultimate Rip-off (merely a teaser for the Instant CD Collection, all previously released and compiled tracks, making it a real redundancy), Eric Idle Sings (not really a MPFC album, and all the tracks have been covered elsewhere by the troupe) are both unnecessary.
However, Hastily Cobbled Together For a Fast Buck album is rarities and otherwise unreleased or released as bonus items. It’s worth doing and once I locate one so I can do a real accounting of it I’ll post that. I don’t see doing much more Monty Python things, in the old days we included “Desktop Themes” (a thing of the past, alas) and wallpapers and sound clips and screensavers and icons and all manner of media, but to do so now would just be repeated what is available elsewhere. We feel the scripts and transcripts fill a need because we have many that are available nowhere else and our own (we feel) accurate versions after reading so many that seemed transcribed by apes of lower intellect.
The Games section will get a major new section when we add the NexusTK pages. Screenshots, text files, maps, there’s a lot of stuff there.
We plan on including a dozen or more new underground comics in the coming months.
However, tha main tasks are done, the site is back up even more complete than it ever was, all the blog posts (as many as possible, anyway) are compiled together in one place and the site is more stable and backupable than ever. We hope the forum will come back, a couple dozen old members have returned but it’s going slow since we’ve had it down off and on for weeks. This week it should return to usability, let’s see if the members return as well.