I was considering the number of articles that I have posted on the site so far this year when it ocurred to me that I really have been doing this for a long time. Maybe not as consistently in the past as I do now, but I certainly have a lot of material archived.
So I went back to take a look at the database from the second incarnation of Asymptomatic. There aren't really a whole lot of records there (I wasn't on the NT platform for very long, and it didn't work very well when I was), but there are some significant entries. For example, everything that I've written for Sundown is in that archived database. That amounts to pages and pages of content.
This, of course, spawned an interest in merging the old database into the new one. It seems like an easy process at first, but then when you compare the database schemas between the old PageCat and the new one, it is obvious that the task will be difficult.
I don't anticipate enjoying adding all of the old entries by hand, which might be the only real solution. It will be a matter of comparing the amount of time required to do that versus the time required to write a utility to do it automatically. Doing it automatically also doesn't get me any of the entries that were created prior to PageCat, which the only way to port is by hand.
In anticipation of the addition of historical articles, I have made a minor improvement to the calendar mechanism. You can now click on the calendar date itself to go to a page that has articles written on that date. The calendar output page is pretty bare for most days, since I usually only write one article per day, but it does suffice for archival purposes. Soon I will have an interface for setting the clock back on the displayed calendar. (The mechanism works, but the interface isn't implemented.)
I have a number of other PageCat improvements in the pipe, but I haven't rolled them out yet. Spell checking in a new editor will be swell. As well as tag insertion and auto-formatting of PageCat tags. I should also modify the image slideshow gadget so that the colors are more universal, or at least match the current site.
