Just when you thought things couldn’t get better…
2. We now have REAL TIME hands-free updating of the Archive! Whenever I want, I simply launch an icon on my desktop and new posts are automatically generated for the web site, the previous/next navigation gets updated, the yearly index and main landing page are re-generated, and then all the changed files automatically synch to my web server. Poof, done. This actually checks every file in the archive. If I do a global fix or format on my local drive - boom all files update themselves on the web without me doing anything other than that first double-click. What was originally started as a shoestring workflow held together with bits of tape and twine years ago is now an open-source based streamlined workflow made of aerospace grade titanium.
3. Ralph Stuart posted under so many hats and in so many ways - and so prolifically - I normalized the output to account for this in the indexings and leaderboards so we don’t end up with multiple instances. Thus, anything that he authored under his various roles and emails during his lifetime will appear as Ralph Stuart if he included his name in the body of his message. So, for example: https://www.ilpi.com/dchas/2022/index_authors.html If you look at the first couple of those, he used several different emails. Makes for a cleaner presentation and it also shows you just how enormous his contributions to the list, division, ACS, and safety community were and continue to be. Miss ya, pal.
OK…I wrote that yesterday and then started thinking about Ralph’s presentation skills and how I miss his graphics….and so I pounded out ANOTHER new feature based on Ralph’s love of this technique, because the man was simply that inspirational:
And if you click on the word, it uses the site’s search engine to search on that term for that year within the DCHAS-L archive only. So if you click on “shield” you get:
The word cloud is based off the subject lines, not post content. It strips out common words, month and day names, words that would pop up too much like “chemical” or “dchas-l”, counts them, does case control (“sds” becomes “SDS”) etc. counts them, and then generates an alphabetical list for the top words. CSS code changes the size and font-weight according to how many hits came up in the run. The result is a clear and readable word cloud, no some unreadable ludicrous multichromic graffiti artwork.
The word cloud is meant to be another quick visual way to grasp hot topics, as the Top Discussion Topics stats at the top of that page require you to process more data and read through other words. It’s not meant to be a formal word analysis.
The only caveat on the word cloud is that my web site’s search engine does not update in real time. But that’s not really an issue here given the low traffic on the archive and the multiple index options.
Fun fact: My custom Python script that runs this now has over 3,300 lines after these latest tweaks.
Stay safe!
Rob Toreki
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On Jun 22, 2026, at 10:07 PM, Info <info**At_Symbol_Here**ilpi.com> wrote:
I just dropped a huge organization update. EXCITING CHANGES. They are really powerful- see below. Using the numbering from my previous post:
0. The automation tests are in process and the list live list should be updating on a near-daily basis within the week.
1. The older posts are now formatted in the new format. One person has offered a mailbox that goes back to 2018, so that can fill the gap on preserving the original data. I may go back and extend threading to 2018 when I get that.
2., 3, 4, 6: Each year now features FOUR INDICES and STATS!!
