greek.doctor’s 6th anniversary and the new.greek.doctor

Hello friends!

Today is this project’s sixth anniversary. If this website was a human it should’ve been able to “bounce ball”, “copy triangle”, and “comfort those in distress”. I thought I’d commemorate this by giving you an update.

Match 1st 2024, only a few days ago, I started specialisation in a speciality which I don’t know how to translate from Norwegian, but I believe it is similar to “emergency medicine” in other countries (akutt- og mottaksmedisin in Norwegian). Up until that date, I was a LIS1, which is an obligatory rotational practice every doctor in Norway must complete before starting specialisation proper. I’m very excited!

I still work on greek.doctor, at least once weekly, by rewriting and copying topics to a new platform on a new website, aptly called new.greek.doctor. You will recognise this platform, called mediawiki, as being the same platform Wikipedia is using. This platform is much better suited for this project than the platform this page is using (WordPress), which is actually a platform for blogs. If only I’d known that from the start so I wouldn’t have to transfer everything now.

Copying pages from here to there is time-consuming (I started doing that more than 18 months ago!) and there is still a long way to go, mostly because I cannot resist rewriting topics when copying them because writing topics is much more fun than copying old topics and ignoring how I know I can do a better job writing them now than when I originally wrote them.

There are many advantages to the new platform. My favorite one is that I can have a “main” or “master” page for a certain disease or subject (like heart failure), and I can then make the topics which are related to that subject extract the parts of that subject which are relevant for the exam in that course (for heart failure that would be pathophysiology, pathology, cardiology, clinical biochemistry, etc.). This allows what I write to be more “centralised” and more easily updatable and reusable across courses, and so that students will recognise material I write from previous courses. It’s also more satisfying for me than to write about the same thing in 5 different topics (probably the most important reason I’m doing this).

I’m also planning to implement a long-awaited feature which generates a pdf file of all the pages for one course, to ease offline use. The pdf will be updated automatically daily or weekly. I could technically implement this on old.greek.doctor (that’s what this will be called from now on) but I won’t bother with that when I’m moving platforms anyway.

Other advantages include:

• better search function
• easier to cross-link and navigate between related topics
• ability to look up subjects without knowing the course it belongs to
• Students can suggest changes to pages (maybe)
• the little summary box at the top of the page (takes time to implement)
• [other advantages I’ve forgotten about]

Because of my full-time work I won’t have a lot of time to dedicate to greek. I’ve also started (paid work) to write for the Great Norwegian Encyclopedia (store norske leksikon), which also takes time. But, greek.doctor is important to me, so I’ll take the time to work on it still. But don’t remain on the edge of your seats waiting for me to finish the migration.

If anyone would pay me to work on greek full time so I wouldn’t have to work clinically, I’d rewrite every single topic and write notes for all subjects I haven’t already written about. If not, there aren’t enough hours in the day to get that done. If anyone is interested, hit me up on email for business inquiries.

The new page is up and running and can be used, but not all topics can be found there yet. Many topics there have been completely rewritten or improved though, which may be of use. Try it!

Until next blog post!