It recently came to my attention that many of the older Hot Rails posts, including all of the original Sydney-Canberra concept alignment sections, were no longer loading properly, either showing just a header image and title but with otherwise blank content, or returning an error message. The bug seems to affect all of the posts prior to the introduction of the WordPress “Gutenberg” block editor in late 2018.
It turns out that the culprits is the “Easy-Table” plugin that I was using to render tables prior to Gutenberg, which has apparently been unsupported for over five years (!). Disabling the plugin seems to have gotten the posts working again, but for some reason the links via the menu bar are not redirecting. The actual posts are accessible via search, but any tables that used this plugin are now rendered as the CSV text string used as input by the plugin.
Thankfully the issue appears to be a fairly simple fix, and there are several CSV to HTML plugins that can recreate the functionality without too much recoding. Unfortunately, this plugin was used extensively in my early work, often several times per post, so it may be a long and tedious process to fix every post, unless I can work out some sort of “search and replace” bulk edit workflow.
Thanks for your patience while I work this out. In the meantime many of the posts are still viewable thanks to the Wayback Machine, here.
