For the past week and a half, I've been working to preserve someone's life work. Someone passed away and they've left behind a giant cache of data, which could, one day soon, be gone forever. Unfortunately, we don't have access to the raw data, just the resulting web site. It has been sobering, combing through it and trying to archive as much as possible. My initial goal is to archive the web site and everything generated from his data. I've mostly accomplished that.

I've also been writing scripts to scrape the data from the thousands of pages, scrape links that aren't in the site map, scrape links to external data sources. It's been a lot of work so far and I don't really have a lot to show for it, in comparison to what it will be eventually. The first step is preserving it, but there are further steps. I don't want to announce what data I'm currently talking about; I don't want someone else swooping in and trying to somehow monetize the opportunity.