h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm glad someone has done this

I've been able to see what entries were on with mine for the first time in a long time!

Rho and I noticed several people had been complaining about having missed their front page day but the staff seemed unable/unwilling to help. So we independently started working on the problem from opposite ends. When we realised this, it made sense to collaborate! Unfortunately the pre-BBC front pages are moderated. The whole site was hidden at the time and no-one got round to passing these as fit for viewing. Again the staff have been unwilling to help. However the latest news is that Jim Lynn is thinking about a front page utility to find the page for a given date. This may or may not apply to moderated ones though.

That would be good if Jim Lynn could do that. Still I think you've done a good job collecting all these pages.

How did you find out exactly what was on the front page for all those months?

Each version of the frontpage has an associated article, that isn't usually deleted. For example, today's is A1941518. Using <./>test1941518</.> - as its contents can't be viewed directly - we can extract part of the information on the frontpage and copy-and-paste it into the archive. The difficult bit was finding these 'frontpage articles', as trial-and-error was the only 'tool' we had at our disposal!

Rho

I take my hat off to you two. It must have been a lot of hard work

I'm very glad you did it though.

How long did it take you to do?

While Rho had started by going forwards from the time it simultaneously occurred to us to do this I had been going backwards. I found that there was a rhythm to the days and weeks and that I was very good at hitting the right number first time. So I got it down to anywhere between a couple of seconds to perhaps 5 minutes or so of searching (I forget now) which was faster than Rho was achieving at the time, having had less practice. So it made more sense for me to finish off the going backwards in numbers bit while he concentrated on copying the contents over. Then I joined him in doing the copying once he had created the group account.

It is quite an achievement. The BBC should be employing you!

I rather hope Rho has better options than that. I know I do.