Site maintenance on Alarrah’s playthrough

FYI for those of you who follow my Skyrim and other Elder Scrolls post: I’m doing an overhaul sweep on my site, driven by how I need to phase out the gallery plugin I’ve been using for my screenshots.

There are two reasons for this:

1. That plugin, FooGallery, has a yearly subscription price. And given that I am now a year and change into being unemployed, I cannot afford to spend money on a WordPress plugin. Every dollar counts.
2. Also, even aside from questions of my job status, that plugin was showing signs of struggling with how many screenshots I have in this site’s media library. I mean seriously, y’all, I have thousands of screenshots. And FooGallery was having issues with screwing up formatting of gallery layouts on older pages, unless I periodically cleaned out some caches for it.

So my game plan for dealing with this is to convert all the FooGallery style galleries to use another plugin I have instead, FileBird. FileBird is a media library plugin that lets you give the library a folder structure, which is super helpful to me given how large my library is. Also, if your folders are full of images, it also adds the ability to display those images in a simple gallery.

Dropping FooGallery also loses me the nice lightboxes I was previously using to show the screenshots when you clicked on them to see the full graphics. Accordingly, I’m also trying out a lightbox plugin called Meow Lightbox, which lets me still have that kind of functionality.

The one thing I will lose and cannot replace in this effort is the ability to organize the screenshot galleries into albums. FileBird does not have album functionality. So because of this, I will also be phasing out having standalone screenshot pages for all the various playthroughs on this site. This will, at least, make the menu structure simpler!

I have now implemented all of these changes on Alarrah’s playthrough. Her posts have been updated, with some formatting issues fixed, and all of her posts with screenshot galleries converted over to use FileBird style galleries instead.

And one last thing I did on Alarrah’s posts was for the earliest ones where I was linking off to Twitter threads, from when I was still live-tweeting my playthroughs. Since I deleted my Twitter account, those links no longer worked. But I did download a full archive of my Twitter account data, and just reconstructed all the threads locally, to maintain them here on this site.

(The one thing I wasn’t able to rebuild from that archive was some of the tweets from other people who may have replied to anything I tweeted. I’d managed to save some of those from before I deleted my account. But other people’s tweets didn’t get saved into the archive I have! So those have been lost. Sorry, for the two or three people who answered those tweets at the time!)

I will be continuing similar maintenance over the next several weeks on the rest of the playthroughs on the site. So heads up that the relevant screenshot pages will be disappearing, too. And I’ll fix any other issues I see in individual posts as I find them.

And oh yes: since running this site does cost me a bit of money every year (not only the cost of some of the plugins, but also the cost of my Internet in general), anyone who has enjoyed my content, do please consider throwing a coin to your Witcher er, uh, Dragonborn on Ko-fi, won’t you?

You can find my Ko-fi right over here:

https://ko-fi.com/annathepiper