20 Years Young

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This site is almost 20 years old.

T-bone (by Randy Martinez)This occurred to me today as I was editing one of the old stories. It’s gone through many twists and turns but it’s somehow still here. I started building it some time around 1995, when I was just learning HTML. The first few incarnations were painstakingly maintained by hand, by me. For years, that’s how it went. At some point, as technology started to grow, I decided that I’d try a content management system to make updates easier. Unfortunately, years of content had to be manually entered and all imagery uploaded and attached to the right pages, etc. It took forever, but it happened.

Unfortunately (again), I chose the wrong content system. The Subdreamer CMS was a bit more proprietary than I would have liked. This proved to be a good decision at the time, but a horrible one in the long run. The software was not open source and would have cost me a lot of money to maintain so I decided to ditch it a few years back for WordPress, which is free software. The crappy part about that decision is that Subdreamer has NO way of simply importing their database into WordPress. As a result (and I’m simplifying a lot of things here) years and years of content had to remain on my Archived site (still accessible from the nav bar in a limited capacity). When I moved to WordPress, I had to (once again) manually populate the articles you see here, while adding new ones all the time. It was ridiculously time consuming.

The most important things, to me, were the cut scenes articles and not so much the old news, so I moved those over along with a few other things and called it a day. If someone ever figured out a good way to port over the data from SD to WP, I’d then take the plunge but SD just isn’t popular enough. WordPress has its own issues, of course. Open source lends itself to hacking and other things you probably don’t care about. So it seems that I may never port over the old, old stuff, which I might have to let go at some point but as time goes by, I feel more and more OK with it. There’s some fun stuff in there and I may yet go back and grab some of it, but for now, the site is what it is and I’ll keep working on it the best I can.

I used to be very off-the-cuff when writing for the site. It was a pseudo-guerrilla reporting style but as time goes by, I look at those old cut scenes articles and, much like Lucas, want to go back and tinker with them. Today, while dealing with a bunch of other things, I went back and looked at a random article and decided it was high time to make some edits. I would love to edit the other pages but, as I’ve said, it’s time consuming. So what I’m going to do is just take one every once in a while and re-edit it for things like readability, links, appearance, and so on. Hopefully, they’ll sound more professional and people will still look to them as references.

I know I haven’t been updating here on the site very often (and I’m always looking for folks to help so inquire within) but make no mistake, it’s still very much alive. I’ll be updating what I can, when I can and I’ll also be going back to fix things. I can’t promise that all the content from the last twenty years is going to survive, but if I can find a way to make it happen, I will. Until then, why not go back and take a peek through the site. Let me know if there’s something you remember that’s missing. I’ll go find it and put it back up for you. I’ll also try and alert you to old pages I’ve updated whenever possible.

For example, today I went through and re-edited a page from the Episode II Cut Scenes area called Return to Tatooine. Have a look.

Thanks for hanging out for (almost) 20 years with old T-bone as we wait for The Force Awakens and a whole new chapter of the Star Wars saga to unfold.

 

 

One thought to “20 Years Young”

  1. T-Bone, I haven’t been checking this site very often, but it is good to see you are still doing this after 20 yrs! I started reading your site back when you first started it. I’ll be checking back now that I see you’ve been updating!

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