Assabil Journal: 12,000 print articles online

Assabil is a Moroccan journal founded in 2004, publishing every two months on heritage, identity and ideas.

An archive that existed only on paper

Nine years of issues had been written, edited and printed, and that is where they stopped. The articles survived as Microsoft Word documents on a machine, and as back issues in a cupboard. A reader outside the subscription — in another Moroccan city, or anywhere abroad — had no way to reach any of it. Neither did a reader in the same city looking for something published three years earlier.

What the journal wanted was the whole run readable, nationally and internationally. That made the website the smaller half of the job.

The migration

• Thousands of archived articles converted from Microsoft Word into clean HTML.

• Each imported as a post carrying the date and category of the paper article it came from, so the online archive mirrors the print run instead of starting in 2013.

That second point is the one that mattered. An archive imported under today's date is a pile; an archive that keeps its own chronology is a publication you can read backwards.

The site

• WordPress as the CMS, so the editorial team could keep publishing without me.

• A black-and-white theme kept deliberately close to a printed journal.

• A homepage surfacing the most-read alongside the latest.

• LiteSpeed page caching, because a large archive has to stay fast.

Where it stands now

The archive has kept growing with the journal. It carries more than 12,000 articles and draws over 30,000 unique readers a year — an audience the print run could never have reached, reading material that would otherwise still be in a cupboard.