Thinking about comments now. Should I keep hosting them? Probably not:
1. The CMS has spam protection that was pretty robust when it was first built, but it's long been defeated. The 18-month-old snapshot of the site on my hard drive has ONLY a couple thousand spams to clear out; I dread what a new snapshot would reveal.
2. It turned out that I didn't enjoy having comments on there at all, not even nice ones. For a few years, my reasons to continue hosting them have been entirely self-serving./1
That is, I wanted archive pages to be different from one another in the eyes of Google and advertising services. That no longer applies as I no longer care about them; even if it still did apply, the planned integration of transcripts would cover that.
3. I am no longer available to manage or moderate comments, haven't been for a long time, and won't be until I hit retirement age, 20+ years from now. I'm dead serious.
So unless someone has a case for me keeping comments, out they go. /2
The next question, then, is, what the hell do I need a powerful PHP-based CMS for? Answer: multi-templating and URL persistance. Follow-up: am I sure I really need those? And if so, can I achieve these in some other, less over-engineered way? /3
@Reinderdijkhuis You could use a templating system on your PC and only upload static files. Depending on your level of comfort with PHP that might be the way to go. Personally I would prefer to handle everything on the server (i.e. use a CMS), but I am a special case because I can fix things in the PHP.
@branko Using static files is something I'm seriously considering. My main concern with that solution is preserving the old URLs which are of the format index.php?p=whatever.
I am pretty sure this can be done and that learning how to do it is within my reach. Question is is it smart?
@Reinderdijkhuis It will certainly drive hackers nuts. :-) I think the only limit is whether your and your web server's OS will allow you to use question marks and the equals character in your file names. Considering special characters have special meanings, it might be smart to switch to readable URLs. You would have to make redirects for all your links though. You can do this in an .htaccess or in an index.php file.
