Galleries on Anna Plays Skyrim are temporarily broken

Y’all, I had to downgrade the subscription plan I’m using on FooGallery, the plugin that manages to my screenshot galleries. The reason for this is, I’m still unemployed, and my unemployment benefits run out in January. So Dara and I had to start instituting some cost-cutting measures, and one of them was the subscription I’m paying for FooGallery.

I did not eliminate FooGallery completely from this site, but I downgraded to the cheapest option available for use on 5 sites.

But here’s the problem: I had forgotten that that tier of subscription removes a core piece of functionality I was using. Namely, creating galleries that read files directly off my server file structure and use a JSON file to get the metadata for them. I’d started using this functionality, longtime readers of this blog may recall, because I started running into issues with FooGallery being able to handle the huge media library this site uses by definition.

Now, though, I’m having to punt back to that previous functionality. Which is requiring me to manually recreate every single screenshot gallery from Merawen’s playthrough forward.

This, as you might imagine, is tedious as fuck. But it’s doable. It’ll just take me a while to fix.

Until I’m done with that, I’m putting a temporary hold on putting up new playthrough posts. I have not lost any actual screenshots or their associated data, but I will need to recreate all the galleries, and I want to do it in the same order they were originally created in. Which means not making any new galleries until that’s done.

And that by extension also means not putting up any new playthrough posts for a bit, just because I don’t want to put up posts and then forget which ones are missing their screenshots. It’ll be easier on me organization-wise if I do it this way.

One more thing: this does also raise the risk of my reproducing the earlier behavior of FooGallery breaking if I try to make it handle too large of a media library in WordPress. I’m going to try to fix this problem by seeing if I can save out a bunch of these files in smaller sizes, and maybe reduce the load on the library. Plus, I know the plugin’s gone through a bunch of revision since the last time I saw that issue. So the issue may or may not repro anyway.

I will post an all clear when I’ve fixed all the galleries and regular playthrough posts can resume.