Happy New Year 2024 and Some News

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First a Happy New Year 2024 to Everyone! We hope you have had a great time during the end of the year. This year is going to be somewhat special for Boiling Steam as well, since we will be celebrating a few months down the road our 10th year anniversary as well.

In 2023 we decided to move away from Wordpress to a static site (after building our own static site generator), and as you can expect there are many things that still remain to be implemented. But one of the most urgent things that had to be done was to import most of the older articles that were not yet available on the site. We have been using Git since 2020 to record and track changes on all of our articles, but everything prior to 2020 was basically in a Wordpress database. Over the past few months, I have worked on making an import script that would convert all the Wordpress syntax that was stored in the database into regular markdown documents. You end up with a fairly long piece of code with a lot of regexes and if conditions to remove stuff that was mostly wordpress related.

This work is now mostly done and we have been able to import most of the missing articles from 2014 onwards. You can now access them directly through this new page that lists up all published articles.

The migration is not yet finished. There are still some missing pictures here and there, some broken links, and some stuff that needs CSS adjustment for styling. But at least, most of the textual content has moved and the rest of the gaps will be fixed progressively. The good thing is that we will end up with a 10 year history stored into Git, which makes the whole site completely portable from now on.

Among the list of new features we want to introduce in the next few months:

  • More automation (invisible to end users, but making our work even more seamless)
  • More specific pages for meaningful categories (hardware reviews, game reviews, etc…)
  • A small yet practical internal search engine
  • Related articles at the end of each post (when relevant)
  • Potentially a comment system (still weighting the pros and cons of having such a feature)

We will share more news as we deploy such features.

Happy New Year again!