This won't do you much good if you don't have the data, but this is my attempt to turn the old Ficlets Archive into a static export. I ended up building a Rails app and then writing a bunch of rake tasks and and after_action filter to just dump out all the files as cleanly as possible. It's a shameless clone of the Ficly Export, with a few things changed to work with ficlets instead.
It took too long, but it works.
- Ruby 2.6.5
- MySQL or MariaDB
- The default database.yml is localhost, and root w/out a password.
- The database name is
ficlets_export
Everything is in db/export. To import the authors, stories and comments, you can run:
- Create the local database:
rake db:create - You need to untar (
cd db/export && tar zxvf *.tar.gz) all the backup files. Commiting over 100k small json files into git just felt rude. - Import everything:
rake export:import-- It will probably take a while to import everything. - Import the tags...
- run
rails c - then
Story.clean_tags, which will clean all the tags in the stories. - then
Tag.generate_tags, which will pull all the tags from the stories and create Tag records for them. Both of those will take a while.
- run
- You'll need to install Ruby 2.6.5 however you want to make that happen.
- Install the bundler gem:
gem install bundler bundle
And there you go!
- Could be better looking, especially on mobile. You're welcome to help with that and submit a pull request!
- Speed up the export process. You're also welcome to help with that. To look at the monster as it is, check out lib/tasks/export.rake.