I started this project in April 2021 but didn’t get around to making a website and tracking my progress until much later that same year. Given that 2022 was the first full year of the .P101 network I thought I would look over what I accomplished and declare what I want to work on in the future.
I started the year by moving all the data I had painstakingly collected about each site from my laptop to the server in a MySQL database. I then added a floating window to each site (proxied and mirrored) to provide information about its status and a link to the authors’ source content. In March I wrote a script to update the master site table and serve its content on the Sites page. Some of the non-coding tasks I undertook during the first half of the year were creating a Twitter account, acquiring the .pirate101 Handshake TLD, and winning a Handshake-themed website contest.
Moving into Summer I got a break from school work and made a lot of progress on grabbing content from Blogger sites. I was able to scrape Edward Lifegem’s blog using Blogger’s API into a database and display it efficiently to the end user. I re-structured the code so that I can serve the entire website off of only one file on this server, saving gigabytes of data in the process. I’m not quite done tidying up the quirks I introduced while modifying the code, but it already functions better than the Wayback Machine’s copy.
The last part of the year I spent on custom domains. Arcanum’s domain expiration in September blind-sided me just as much as Edward Lifegem’s in January. Two big and recently active sites went down and I was trying to avoid any more. A script I wrote to track this information alerted me that Pirate101 Central was about to expire, so I jumped to action and attempted to scrape all of its valuable content. Thankfully the domain did not expire but now I have experience using wget to download sites.
I faced a lot of trouble over the course of the year with web hosting. I used Cloud at Cost to host the entire p101 network and had constant problems. In May the kernel of the server I was using got corrupted and it would not power on without the assistance of customer support. I transferred all of my data to a new server hosted by the same provider which worked well enough until November. Their support went to crap and my VPS got deleted in the process. Thankfully I made some backups in early October, but that was still two months of progress lost. I ended up getting a new hosting plan from RackNerd which has better reviews, so hopefully things work out better this time.
A few interesting data points:
- I made 17 posts in 2022 with at least one per month
- July had the most posts at 4
- I started a Twitter account and made 11 tweets
- 3 different servers hosted this site
- 3 fansite domains have expired
- 19 fansites (including nic.p101) produced content in 2022
- 11 fansites produced content in December 2022
Some goals for 2023 (in no particular order):
- Finish backdated September post
- Clean up edward.p101 mirror (and replicate for other Blogger sites)
- Host my own p101 name servers
- Setup a Git instance to keep track of code
- Start obtaining Google+ data
- Download all p101 discords
- Withdraw p101 domain from Namebase
- Reach out to site owners!
The main reason for this post was to catalog the above goals as a reminder to myself, but then I decided to look through what I had been able to accomplish last year too. Being stuck in the back of a cramped car for a four hour drive through Tennessee provided the perfect opportunity to look through my old posts and start a new one because there is not much else I could do on the little available hot-spot bandwidth.