The unloved state of this site
Since the Windows server that was running this web site got unexpectedly turned off some time ago I put in a bit of work to transform the site into something that would work on Linux, but it hasn't received any love since then.
There's more than a few things that I need to do. Because I'm a bit of an idiot, I accidentally deleted the photo backup from S3 when clearing old buckets one day, so when the server was turned off I lost most of the images (the ones that are here now where on the way back machine). There are also parts of the site that don't work properly. Property pages and the postcode pages are the most noticeable I guess.
The plan
Fixing the photos is going to take time. I have all of the original photos, but I may need to re-edit some so they will never be exactly the same as the ones that were lost. I don't think that matters all that much really. There are also missing diagrams and screen captures. These will have to be re-created. All in all, this process is going to take time and it would help me to get some measure of progress.
For the functionality that isn't working, I need to implement new versions of these parts of the site. I'm thinking of making much more use of AngularJS to drive these parts of the site. The Fost 4 technology stack has some very cool RESTful JSON database technology that should make this fairly simple, so long as I don't care about Google indexing these pages. That's probably find to start with.
The main thing of course is new content. I have a few open source projects that really need to have much better documentation. The two main ones are Fost 4 and Django Slumber, and I need to make time to start to put that together in a much better form.
What is hard right now is the publishing process. I'm still running the old FOST.3™ stack on a Windows VM that I use for authoring. I then have some Python scripts that dump that data out and transform it into something that the new Fost 4 based web server I wrote can deal with. This is all a bit awkward, but passably workable. It'll be a lot of work to put together something with the features that the site uses that make authoring directly on the site available again.
The other thing that I've been forced to turn off is the user comments. Due to the spam issues this wasn't such a big deal, but something like Disqus should make it reasonably simple to get working comments again without too much work.
The progress
One of the things that I should probably also write a bit about is an old test spider. You can let this loose on a site and it will crawl it looking for errors. When I turn it lose on the site it sees a total of 1,194 resources, of which 248 are errors of one form or another.
So, until I get around to fixing more of this, you'll just have to put up with the new larger font :)
