This post is going to be short because I had written it in November (currently January 2023) and, after my server instance got deleted, lost all progress. In the grand scheme of things I didn’t learn much so here is the gist. Last month I created a system to check when a website’s domain would …
Everyone loves having their own domain name. For around $10 per year you can have a short, memorable string that points to your content and contributes to a large part of its identity. I can’t speak for everyone, but personally I would rather go to finalbastion.com than 143.198.60.42. This system works out great until the …
Previously I have been creating and populating the Blogger post archive menu server-side with PHP. This works well enough for the options which need to be shown by default, but it quickly becomes unwieldly when end-users expand each year/month.
One of the hardest tasks I encountered during this push was making sure the links at the bottom of each post pointed to its chronological neighbors. It may seem minor at first but completing this would mark the first true advantage over the Wayback Machine from and end user’s perspective. Notice how when you visit …
Remember just a bit ago when I said that I was passing more than just updated-max and max-results in the query string? Here is why: if I kept the structure of /year/month in the URL, I would need to actually create folders on the server for every single combination of the two and have an …
I touched upon PHP in a few previous posts, most heavily in Moving to a MySQL Database as a way to hack database information into a WordPress page. Dynamically writing HTML is exactly what PHP does so I will be using extensively in this post. Specifying Database User Information The first thing that needs to …
As you can see in the previous post, scraping from the Blogger API only yields the content of the post itself and some related metadata like date and author. In order to make the posts look like they came from the original website the formatting and CSS need to be copied over. You might be …
I spent all of last month scraping Edward Lifegem’s Blogger site from the API. That’s great and all, but what is the point if no one can access the content? My goal for July was to pull content from a database and make it look and behave as closely to the original site as possible. …
All of the websites I had downloaded up to this point were using the WinHTTrack utility. I love that program because it is super easy; you simply paste the domain of the website you want to download and click start. Depending on how large the site is you should have a fully cloned website within …
I really should be studying for my finals tomorrow but I got distracted and clicked through a few of the more recently updated websites listed on the Sites page. I noticed that the Buccaneers, Babey! content column hadn’t been updated recently even though it is one of the most active blogs indexed by the NIC. …