[Feature] recover old and historic news items and make them available via news.md

[lcn2]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched for existing issues and did not find anything like this

Describe the feature

It might be fun to restore old news items and make them available.

We don’t propose adding then to news.md directly as that might make the resulting web page excessively long and full of mostly outdated news items. Instead one might add them to some new archive/news/ directory. The bottom of the news.md file could indicate that older news items are available via some archive/news/index.html (via archive/news/README.md markdown file) file.

The archive/news/README.md file could have sections by calendar year with a table of contents at the top.

When the existing news.md file needs old news to be “cleaned out”, instead of removing them, such news items could be moved over into the archive/news/README.md file.

Relevant images, screenshots or other files

N/A

Relevant links

See issue 2686 from the temp-test-ioccc repo for the previous TODO item

Anything else?

Remarks from the previous TODO item

Suggestion: rather than make all in news.html make it in one of the following locations:

• archive/news (news.md and news.html ? Not sure but the downside of here is that there's no link in the menu).
• news/archived.html (from md file like all the others).
• old-news.html
• something else (what?) ?

The reason is to make the news page not really long.

Another option that might be better yet is below.

Have a subdirectory called news with the current news file being recent.html. The top level news.html can be a symlink to that file OR in the menu it can link to it.

Then separate the old news based on the year. Or maybe based on which IOCCC it was (does the 28th contest at the 29th end up having the news in between the two or would it be in the 29th?).

Downside to this idea is that there would be a lot of files. If that's a problem it might be by every N years (maybe 5 but not sure)?

On the other hand the fact the news isn't updated that often might mean not many files are even needed and it could even be a single old file (archived news) and the recent news. Or even just one file.

Personally I think the last idea might be the most ideal but maybe a subdirectory is useful (but it might not be either).

Remarks from the original TODO item

On possible idea is to adopt some sort of archival news page as suggested by comment-2158965619. If that is done, some way back machine digging and/or repo history digging should be done to recover some historical news that has been "lost".

We suggest that a new directory archive/news/ be created so that old news from, say 2019 could go into archive/news/2019.news.md from which archive/news/2019.news.html would be built by bin tools. The file archive/news/README.md would hold an inventory/table of contents linking to the individual archived news year pages and the bin tools could use that README to form archive/news/index.html.

The bottom of the top level news.md would always hold some sort of "for older IOCCC news, see the IOCCC news archive" that would link to the archive/news/index.html archived news page.

Consider if we should or shouldn't think out news.md and retain high level items. However, also consider comment-2158965619 as a reason not to thin out the news.

See also 2003 website archive as per comment-2180597422.

Priority

This issue should be considered after IOCCC28 is complete.

[xexyl]

Just as you assigned to me 'over there' please assign it to me here too and after the next IOCCC I can start looking at it .. though I probably will have to set a reminder for it.

Thanks!

[lcn2]

We believe we have addressed all of the current questions that still need answering at this time. If we've missed something or something else needs to be clarified, please ask again.

[xexyl]

Just set a reminder for this shortly after the contest closes .. though as you know I do have other things planned after it.

It's nice that this is the only issue and that the contest is finally running. Best wishes for a good rest of your day.

[lcn2]

We believe we have addressed all of the current questions that still need answering at this time. If we've missed something or something else needs to be clarified, please ask again.

[xexyl]

I totally forgot about this ... I still would be willing to do this one of course but I have so much on my mind and that includes other higher priority IOCCC things.

Perhaps what we need (after judging as I know you're focused on that) to do is discuss the possibilities and then we can let it sit for a bit.

But of course there are those jparse issues / enhancements, issues/enhancements with mkiocccentry toolkit (and I replied to most of the issues yesterday) and I know you wanted to go on holiday as well .. plus i have other things as well.

Hopefully before you do go on holiday we can discuss the things though.

Hope you also don't forget to sleep during judging!

[lcn2]

We believe we have addressed all of the current questions that still need answering at this time. If we've missed something or something else needs to be clarified, please ask again.