MPQ Archive Update in 2025! ^
by Paul - Saturday 19 July 2025 @ 02:05
Hello there! Quick news update. You shouldn't notice any changes as such but this is now a static HTML site. Main reason is make the hosting easier to manage.
Amazingly the site I cobbled together in 2006 ran, pretty much error free, until 2023. My hosting removed support for PHP 5, understandly. So errors were appearing on pages mainly due to the deprecation of various old PHP and MySQL functions. To keep the site running, I refactored the site to PHP 8. I wasn't really happy with the results code wise but it was running again.
Anyhoo (I still like to ramble), a couple of years later in 2025, I wanted to ditch my current hosting because you can host this kind of site much cheaper now so I decided to bin the PHP and MySQL and convert the site to static HTML. To make it much easier to host indefinitely. So I used that as an excuse to learn Rust to write a console app to do it. And here we are! This complete site is in a git repo that is automatically published. And there's another repo with the Rust code and assets that can quickly rebuild it. I've tried my best to fix various dead links and brought back the old old MPQ site.
As part of the changes, the account registration and comments logic have been removed. In my PHP 8 refactoring it was an open issue that I didn't think was worth the effort implementing and part of the prompt to go static. The search page functionality is still there but more basic but there are the archive listings if you need them.
My intention is still to keep the site running as an archive. So, enjoy!
