Back in June the PostHope site went down. Since then the administrators of that site have been trying to restore a temporary version of the site so authors could download their posts. This work was finally completed last night – about one month later than their originally announced time. But I’m appreciative of the effort that some volunteers put in to restore a site that isn’t going to be active anymore, just so past users could grab an archive of their site.
I’ve now added those posts to this site to archive them and make them available. Looks like there were 137 of those posts.
For the technically minded among you, here’s how I did it. The archive came as an old format Word document (.doc). I converted this to a new Word document (.docx), then used pandoc to convert it to Markdown, used gcsplit to split the large file into a file for each post and then some fish shell scripts (with sed) to get the files into the right location, name them appropriately, and convert them to quarto files with the appropriate YAML header information for this site.
Since this conversion was entirely automated, there may be some artifacts here and there. I already know that all the images were lost – that was a known issue with the PostHope export. So for any posts that refer to an image, you’ll just have to use your imagination until (if ever) I go back and add images. If you happen to spot something else that doesn’t look right, let me know, and I’ll see if it is worth going back to fix.
On the other hand, I don’t expect many people will go back to read old posts. I mostly wanted them for myself. There have been several times since the site went down that I wished I could consult them to remember exactly when something happened. Mostly this was because of a question from one of the nurses, but sometimes for my own curiosity.