One or two of you may remember that I did a bit of work restoring Anna Raccoon’s site?

I have actually been working on it ever since.

The problem was simple – give someone five jigsaws, each of a couple of thousand pieces, where all show the same picture, all are cut to different patterns and most of the pieces are missing from each box.  The challenge is to try to recreate the original picture without knowing what the original picture looked like.

I kept everything in one folder to make things a little easier.  It contains the original five collections, all the work files I created and the site I was using for tests……

As you can see – quite a lot of stuff?

Anyhows I rewrote all my little programmes to treat all five sources simultaneously and produce a unified output.  The main problem was in eliminating duplicates as each source was subtly different [did you know that a simple double quote – ” – can be represented in several different ways on a website?].

Yesterday I uploaded the final output from all the programmes.  It contains extra posts, but [hopefully] no duplicates, though I found at least one post that had been published twice but on different days.  It expands the list of categories and also includes tags which weren’t there before.

Now I have a problem.

You see, I enjoyed the challenge.  I had to invent ways of doing things and find solutions to sneaky little problems.  It gave the grey matter some exercise.  It was fun.  It distracted me at a time when family problems abounded.

Now I need something else.

I’m tossing around various ideas in my head to start a new project but none of them is challenging enough, or else I know from the outset that an idea just won’t work.

Bugger!

Maybe I’ll just rip this site asunder and rebuild it……….