Changelog

A history of updates to this site.

March 2026 — The Rebuild

March 30 — Location Data Enrichment & Map Expansion

  • @mention venue extraction — Identified 65+ restaurant names from Instagram @handles in post bodies (e.g., @franklinbbq → Franklin BBQ, @snowsbbq → Snow's BBQ)
  • Location field cleanup — Fixed 451 posts with messy location/city fields where full captions had been dumped into venue name fields
  • Texas & Louisiana coverage — Added city/region data for 16 Texas posts (Austin, Lockhart, San Antonio) and 8 New Orleans posts that were missing from the map
  • Map expansion — cityCoords lookup table expanded from 46 to 104 cities, adding Austin, New Orleans, Medellin, Osaka, Chicago, and 50+ more
  • Additional geocoding — 185 more venues geocoded via Foursquare, bringing total to 841 precise GPS coordinates
  • Map pins — Map now shows 1,384 pins with 841 exact GPS locations across LA, Texas, Louisiana, New York, San Francisco, Asia, and beyond

March 29 — Venue Geocoding & Data Cleanup

  • Foursquare geocoding — Batch-resolved 655 venues to precise addresses and GPS coordinates via Foursquare Places API
  • Dead image cleanup — Stripped 5,631 dead wp.com Photon CDN image references from 397 posts, eliminating all 403 console errors
  • Instagram venue extraction — Parsed restaurant names and cities from 147 Instagram captions using pattern matching and hashtag analysis
  • Address extraction — Parsed 20 street addresses from blog post body content (#### heading blocks)
  • Map upgrade — Map now shows 1,600+ pins (up from ~1,000), with 656 precise GPS locations
  • Solution docs — Added docs/solutions/ for documenting technical solutions and runbooks

March 28 — Archive, Dark Mode & Map Enhancements

  • Year/month archive — Browse all 2,100+ posts by year and month at /archive
  • Dark mode — Toggle between light and dark themes; respects system preference and saves choice
  • Broken image handling — Gracefully hides broken image references in old posts instead of showing broken icons
  • GPS coordinates — Instagram posts now save exact GPS from EXIF data for precise map pins
  • Venue/city extraction — Automatically extracts restaurant names and cities from Instagram captions and hashtags
  • Map enhancements — Map now shows venue names, exact GPS pins (📍), and supports more posts
  • Location backfill — Script to retroactively add GPS and city data to already-imported Instagram posts
  • robots.txt — Added for proper search engine crawling
  • SEO complete — Open Graph, Twitter Cards, JSON-LD, sitemap, RSS, canonical URLs all in place

March 28 — Features & Polish

  • Search — Added client-side instant search across all 2,100+ posts
  • Restaurant Map — Interactive map showing 782 restaurant locations using Leaflet.js and OpenStreetMap
  • Best Of pages — Curated lists organized by cuisine, type, and region
  • Related Posts — "You might also enjoy" recommendations on every post, matched by city, cuisine, and category
  • Closed restaurant badges — 39 closed restaurants detected and marked with CLOSED badge and grayscale thumbnail
  • Restaurant categorization — Extracted restaurant names (1,649), cities (1,034), and regions (810) from post content
  • Image optimization — All 7,503 images converted to WebP format (40% size reduction)

March 27 — Content Import

  • Instagram import — 1,649 posts imported from Instagram data export, including 4,664 images and 213 videos
  • Thirsty Pig logo — Added the pig-with-beer logo to header and footer
  • Social media links — Instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Vimeo links in footer
  • WordPress cleanup — Removed AKPC, Popularity, AddToAny, and LinkWithin plugin remnants from 900+ posts
  • Tina CMS — Added configuration for visual content editing at /admin
  • GitHub + Vercel — Repository pushed to GitHub, deployed to Vercel with custom domain
  • DNS setup — thirstypig.com (primary), thethirstypig.com (redirect), and www variants configured

March 26 — Foundation

  • Wayback Machine scraper — Built Python scraper to recover content from three archived domains
  • Content recovery — 1,166 posts fetched, 1,157 parsed, 228 duplicates removed = 923 unique blog posts
  • Image recovery — 2,846 images recovered across two passes (Wayback Machine + Blogspot CDN + CDX search)
  • Astro site — Scaffolded with Tailwind CSS v4, Content Collections, sitemap, RSS feed
  • SEO — Open Graph tags, Twitter Cards, JSON-LD structured data, canonical URLs
  • Pages — Homepage, post detail, paginated archive, category pages, about page

2017 — Original Blog Ends

Final post published on thirstypig.com in March 2017. Instagram becomes the primary platform for The Thirsty Pig's food content.

2013 — Migration to thirstypig.com

Blog migrated from thethirstypig.com to thirstypig.com on WordPress. Content coverage expanded to include restaurants in Shanghai, Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and other international cities.

2009 — Migration to WordPress

Blog moved from Blogspot to WordPress at thethirstypig.com. Added categories, tags, a pig rating system, and the Cocktail of the Week series.

2008 — The Beginning

The Thirsty Pig launched on Blogspot at blog.thethirstypig.com. First posts covered LA dining favorites, Korean BBQ, ramen, and the emerging food truck scene.

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