Good luck on it all. That's great timing, too -- the yearly competition seems to be when there's the most activity in regards to IF reviews.

Flack, thanks for sharing your advice and experiences. You've pretty much convinced me! To be honest, right after I wrote my last email to Robb about RFTK I had the thought, "If migrating to Wordpress will get Robb to write more IF reviews than he would have otherwise, that in itself is reason enough to switch." The reviews are what the site's all about, after all. I still feel that way, and it looks Ben is staying neutral for now so he might not totally hate the idea of a change (or DOES HE?).

In any case, nothing will actually happen until Robb's done moving so you can expect an official announcement sometime in the next few weeks. Ideally, I'd like to relaunch sometime in May so everything will be running smoothly by the time the competition starts.

Oh, as for the migration... I think you can retain your page ranking with a 301 redirect. Basically you would do a mod_rewrite and point all the old links to new links on the new site (WordPress or otherwise). I'll be honest though, I tried doing it once when moving a podcast from one host to another (before iTunes allowed you to redirect podcasts) and I never did get it to work -- although I think the problem was with my old/previous hosting service. I forget where JC is hosted these days, but it most likely wouldn't be a problem. The headache upfront of moving the content over would be regained over time (drafts, email/subscription lists, social media sharing, no more manual html coding, etc.)

The very first website I wrote for had a convoluted CMS that involved FTP'ing text files into a directory (along with matching .jpg files) that had to manually be added to the front page. Seems barbaric, in retrospect. When I launched my first review site (Review to a Kill), I simplified the process by allowing writers to upload their own files through a web interface. I didn't know anything about web security back then and this also allowed a hacker to upload malware to the site that ultimately got my page deleted and my hosting account canceled. For my own personal site, I had written my own CMS that allowed to post updates and not much more (it literally added new posts to a text file and then appended all the old posts back into the same file).

According to this post I made the switch to WordPress back in 2005 and haven't looked back. It has its flaws like anything else, but I've had pretty good luck by picking secure passwords, keeping the number of plugins to a minimum, and patching/updating religiously. I think I'm running 4 or 5 WordPress sites at the moment. I used to be really into writing custom plugins and tweaking the look but I really only have time for content at this point, and barely that.

Ben: Fantastic! I really think Trotting Krips is going to better than ever...when we collectively get around to making it so, anyway.

Flack: Thanks for that. I admit I still think of blogging when I hear "Wordpress," but it really has become a respectable and versatile CMS nowadays. You have a nice looking site and we definitely might want to do something similar with Krips 2.0.

My knowledge of how Google works is probably way outdated now, but I seem to have the idea that redirects wouldn't necessarily preserve the PageRank of the old page. And of course now it's not just PageRank that you have to worry about -- independent websites in general seem to get much less love from the algorithm these days. I swear sometimes Google just starts giving me random Wikipedia pages if it deems my search too unusual.

Just wanted to throw this out there... WordPress has a lot of free plugins available that can change the look and feel of a site. I use one called Alphabetical List which allows you to list all of your articles (in our case, reviews) as a list instead of a bunch of truncated blog entries. You can see what I'm talking about here:

https://review-o-matic.com/category/books/

I still show the most recent reviews on the front page bloggystyle, but you could replace that with a static landing page if you wanted. This doesn't help with losing the Google standings for all the old reviews (I'm guessing you could do it with pointer files and redirects if you really wanted to) but if you were restarting from scratch, this is how I'd do it.

I'm in! Once I remember how to play text games and write reviews about them!

Hey Ben, how would you feel about a potential revival of Reviews From Trotting Krips ahead of this year's competition? I finally broke my writer's block and wrote a new review which Robb will be uploading sooner or later, probably later, and I have a couple more reviews in the pipeline which may or may not ever see the light of day. Considering I've tried to write a comeback review at least 5 or 6 times over the past two decades and failed miserably each time, this is downright encouraging!

I know the reviews won't be the same -- twenty years is a long time, after all -- but I'm hoping my new works will be just as bad as the old ones only in a different way. As far as I can tell, no one is really doing similar reviews of IF today...at least not actively. If we don't pick the mantle up again, who will? Robb and I have been having informal discussions about just what picking up the mantle might mean. Personally, I'm going to aim for one review a month, picking up the pace a bit during the competition and then vanishing over the holidays. Robb might write the occasional review or two when he's not actively working on a game. You could write a review whenever you felt like it, just like you've been doing!

If we do this, we have to decide whether we're going to create a new site or just update the old. Robb wants an easier way to update the site and suggested using Wordpress. I'm not sure what exactly he has in mind, but it doesn't mean we'd be starting a blog per se. I wouldn't want the reviews to be sorted chronologically so that new reviews bury the old ones, for instance. We could still have section pages that link to all the reviews. The official Jolt Country Cryptozooper page is a Wordpress post even though it doesn't particularly look like a Wordpress post. Wordpress would give us an easy way to handle comments with spam protection as well. I'm not sure what moving to Wordpress would mean for the old site, though. Some of the old reviews of more obscure games still rank pretty highly in Google surprisingly; it'd be a shame to lose the old URLs and the look and feel of the original site. Google doesn't like duplicate content so maintaining the old site and a new site with much of the same content might not be a great idea, either. So we might want leave the old site untouched and use Wordpress for new reviews. We could call it Return to Trotting Krips, Trotting Krips 2: Electric Boogaloo, or Trotting Krips Johto League.

I countersuggested to Robb that we might keep the old site and modernize it a bit. We could use CSS instead of tables for formatting which should make creating new review pages less of a chore. We might even want to set up some margins! The other alternative is to keep the old site exactly as it is and revel in the nostalgia. There's a good chance this would keep us from building a new audience which would definitely lower the pressure. You could even argue that the design of the original website remains extremely appropriate for an interactive fiction review site. I'd even be willing to format the reviews for you guys if you didn't want to deal with editing HTML any more.

I'm going to send you a private message with my new email for Krips related business. Let me know if there any cool new IF-related listservs I should check out.

P.S. Happy birthday, Robb!

Hey look! It's the mysterious, third TROTTING KRIP!

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Sun Apr 07, 2019 1:12 pm Thanks guys. I got a nice mail from a person in this website's past that I am going to write back. He saw all of your messages. I think he registered! One sec. And thanks again fellas!

I for one am hoping this mystery man is none other than Rowdy Roody Yogurt. He always brought a certain je ne sais quoi to everything he did, be it writing IF or writing IF reviews, and definitely classed the joint up a bit whenever he was around.

P.S. Happy birthday, Robb! (again)

P.P.S. Happy Robb's birthday, Ben!

Thanks guys. I got a nice mail from a person in this website's past that I am going to write back. He saw all of your messages. I think he registered! One sec. And thanks again fellas!

Happy birthday :-)

I already did this via other channels, so I'm out.

Happy Birthday Robb!

I'm toasting you with a dram of Laphroaig, hoping your birthday is as wonderful as this scotch you recommended.

Here is where you will accept our birthday wishes again and again. Surrender yourself.