Just giving anyone reading this site a brief progress report.
There’s still a lot of work to be done on the Rantlister Archival and Revival Project, but we’re hoping to have it completed by the end of March.
The layout still requires some tweaking in various places, like the footer. Using a combination of GeneratePress and ChatGPT, I’ve done my best to attempt to recreate Ikarus, the old theme that the site used in 2010. It’s not perfect, but I think it still captures the past well enough.
As you can probably see, I’m recreating The List. Since 95% of the sites on it are long dead, I’m linking to copies of them on the Internet Archive. For the 5% of sites that are still online, I’m just linking directly to them. As of this writing I’m about halfway through updating the links.
I still have to go through and repost the interviews and the iRants. There’s also some old creative writing posts by Bagoda and others, I’ll be reposting them as well, making sure to credit appropriately. Hopefully they don’t mind. Everything is being reposted with the original post dates.
I also have to do something with the About, Join, iRant, and Forum pages. Obviously the forum isn’t coming back (though I do have an old backup sitting here…), so I was thinking of making a page explaining what the Rantlister Forum was and the kind of stuff we used to talk about on it. Currently the About, Join, and iRant pages all have the original text that they had back in 2010. I’m probably going to update the About page to reflect what we’re doing here now. We’re also considering allowing new iRants from staff and readers. Still not sure what’s going to happen with the Join page. In any case, the original text from 2010 will be saved, and probably given their own articles. Kind of like what I did on AJnet Magazine with the various About pages.
The endgame is to not only create an archive of Rantlister, but also turn this into a sort of museum/shrine for the early 2000’s internet rant scene, and maybe even build something new in the process. I’ll probably make another post in the next couple of weeks with some of the ideas we’ve been kicking around.
We’ll be working on the site sporadically over the next few weeks, and if all goes according to plan the site should be fully finished by April. Then we can move on to the next project, the DrakeGTA Archives. Anyone from the old days who’s found this page and wants to contribute anything (files, memories, whatever), drop us a line at [email protected].
