MichaelGiltz.com - Journalism Portfolio Website

A comprehensive journalism portfolio website featuring 20+ years of entertainment journalism, reviews, and interviews. The site includes over 4,200 articles from publications like The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, Entertainment Weekly, and many more.

🌟 Features

• Extensive Article Archive: 4,200+ PDFs organized by publication
• Full-Text Search: Search across all articles with extracted text content
• Admin Panel: One-click updates for new content
• SEO Optimized: Automatically generated HTML versions of all PDFs
• Responsive Design: Works on all devices
• Social Integration: BlueSky, Facebook, and Substack newsletter

🚀 Quick Start

Updating with New Articles

Follow these steps to add new articles to your website:

1. Save articles as PDFs

   • For each article, save/download as PDF from the publication's website
   • Use this filename format: Publication-Title-MM-DD-YYYY.pdf
   • Example: HuffPo-Theater_Review_Hamilton-03-15-2025.pdf
   • Place all PDFs in the "PDFs to Compress" folder on your Desktop

2. Compress all PDFs

   • Double-click "Compress PDFs on Desktop.command"
   • Wait for "Processing complete!" message
   • All PDFs will be compressed at once

3. Move compressed PDFs to scans

   • Open the "Compressed PDFs" folder on your Desktop
   • Select ALL files in this folder
   • Move them to: /Users/spencejb/Documents/GiltzWeb 2/scans/
   • The "Compressed PDFs" folder should now be empty

4. Upload to website

   • Open your FTP client
   • Connect to ftp.michaelgiltz.com
   • Navigate to the scans/ folder
   • Upload all the new PDFs you just moved

5. Update the website

   • Go to http://michaelgiltz.com/admin
   • Click the "Process New PDFs" button
   • The system will process all new articles at once
   • Wait for "Website updated successfully!" message

Done! All your new articles are now live with embedded PDFs and searchable text.

Archive Web Articles as PDFs

To save online articles as compressed PDFs:

1. Open Terminal
2. Navigate to project folder: cd "/Users/spencejb/Documents/GiltzWeb 2"
3. Run archiver: python3 archive_article_simple.py
4. Enter the article URL
5. Enter filename in format: Publication-Article_Title-MM-DD-YYYY
6. Find compressed PDF on your Desktop

Example: Variety-Oscar_Nominations_2024-01-23-2024.pdf

Compress Existing PDFs (Standalone Use)

If you need to compress PDFs separately:

1. Put PDFs in the "PDFs to Compress" folder on Desktop
2. Double-click "Compress PDFs on Desktop.command"
3. Find compressed PDFs in "Compressed PDFs" folder

Features:

• 72 DPI compression (~90% size reduction)
• Optimized for fast web viewing with linearization
• Originals automatically moved to "Original PDFs" folder
• Processes all PDFs in the folder at once

For Developers

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/jessespencersmith/michaelgiltz.git
cd michaelgiltz

# Install Python dependencies (if any)
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Run local test
python3 scripts/test_local.py

📁 Project Structure

.
├── articles/                 # Combined HTML pages (4,200+ files) - NEW!
├── scans/                    # PDF articles (4,200+ files)
├── admin/                    # Admin panel
│   └── index.php            # Admin interface (updated)
├── scripts/                  # Processing scripts
│   ├── create_combined_pages.py  # Creates HTML+PDF pages
│   ├── process_new_pdfs.py      # Processes new uploads
│   └── deploy.py                # Deployment script
├── *.htm                    # Main HTML pages (all updated)
├── search.php               # Search functionality (updated)
├── giltz.css               # Stylesheet
├── compress_pdf_web.py      # PDF compression tool
└── archive_article_simple.py # Web article archiver

🛠️ Technical Details

PDF Processing System

The site now uses a combined HTML+PDF system:

1. Filename Format: Publication-Title_of_Article-MM-DD-YYYY.pdf
2. Combined Pages: Each PDF gets an HTML page with:
   • Embedded PDF viewer at the top
   • Extracted text content below for SEO
   • Site navigation and branding
3. Automatic Updates: Publication pages are updated with new article links
4. Search Integration: Full text search across all articles

Admin Panel

Located at /admin, the admin panel provides:

• One-click processing of new PDFs
• Shows unprocessed PDF count
• Recent PDF listing with status
• Processing statistics
• Test mode for verification
• Automatic publication page updates

Search Functionality

• Full-text search across all articles
• Searches extracted text content in HTML pages
• Returns excerpts with highlighted search terms
• Links directly to combined HTML pages
• Much faster and more accurate than before

🔧 Configuration

FTP Settings (scripts/deploy.py)

host = "ftp.michaelgiltz.com"
username = "[email protected]"
remote_dir = "/"

Admin Password

The admin panel is protected with HTTP Basic Authentication. To set up:

1. Use an online htpasswd generator
2. Create .htpasswd file in /admin
3. Update .htaccess with correct path

📝 Content Guidelines

PDF Naming Convention

• Format: Publication-Title_of_Article-MM-DD-YYYY.pdf
• Publication: No spaces (use HuffPo, not Huffington Post)
• Title: Use underscores for spaces
• Date: MM-DD-YYYY format

Supported Publications

• HuffPo (Huffington Post)
• BookFilter
• Popsurfing
• NYPost (New York Post)
• LATimes (Los Angeles Times)
• And 30+ more...

🚀 Deployment

Full Site Upload (NEW)

python3 upload_site.py

This uploads:

• All HTML pages with updated links
• 4,213 combined article pages
• Updated search functionality
• Admin panel updates

Process New PDFs Locally

python3 scripts/create_combined_pages.py

Quick HTML Updates

python3 deploy_html.py

🔒 Security

• Admin panel password protected
• Sensitive files excluded from repository
• FTP credentials stored locally only
• .htaccess protects sensitive directories

🐛 Troubleshooting

PDFs Not Processing

• Check filename format matches convention
• Ensure no special characters in filename
• Verify PDF is valid and not corrupted

Admin Panel Access Issues

• Verify .htpasswd exists in admin directory
• Check .htaccess path is correct
• Ensure password was generated with Apache MD5

Search Not Working

• Verify extracted_content/ directory exists
• Check PHP is enabled on server
• Run full update to regenerate HTML files

📈 Recent Updates (January 2025)

• Combined HTML+PDF pages for all articles
• Improved search with full text indexing
• PDF compression workflow
• Web article archiving tool
• Automatic publication page updates
• Enhanced admin panel

🎯 Future Enhancements

• Automatic social media posting
• Analytics integration
• Comment system
• Related articles feature
• Mobile app
• RSS feed generation

👨‍💻 Development

Local Testing

python3 scripts/test_local.py

Adding New Features

1. Create feature branch
2. Test locally
3. Update documentation
4. Submit pull request

📄 License

© 2025 Michael J. Giltz. All rights reserved.

Articles and content are the sole property of Michael Giltz and the original publishers. Code and infrastructure may be used with attribution.

🤝 Contributing

While this is primarily a personal portfolio site, bug reports and feature suggestions are welcome:

1. Fork the repository
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/AmazingFeature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add some AmazingFeature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/AmazingFeature)
5. Open a Pull Request

📞 Contact

Michael Giltz

• Email: [email protected]
• BlueSky: @mgiltz.bsky.social
• Facebook: michael.giltz
• Newsletter: Subscribe on Substack

🙏 Acknowledgments

• Built with Python, PHP, and classic web technologies
• Hosted on BlueHost
• PDF processing powered by PyPDF2
• Over 20 years of journalism archived and searchable

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Note: This repository contains the website infrastructure. The actual article PDFs are not included due to size and copyright considerations.