About

R4NT (Reading For New Times) was a Calgary independent magazine published from March 2001 through October 2010. This is the complete archive, restored from the original WordPress database and gap-filled from the live static export.

What you’re looking at is roughly nine and a half years of music reviews, restaurant write-ups, films, games, wine, festivals, photography, original short films, and a handful of years of a podcast called R4NT Radio — written by 83 contributors across two sister sites: the magazine itself, and a behind-the-scenes companion at blog.r4nt.com.

The site went through several major redesigns — custom CMSes between 2001 and 2008, then a final move to WordPress for the v8 era. The visual identity here (the wordmark, decorative pieces, the flame icon) is recovered from that final v8 theme.

By the numbers

Resurrecting the archive

By 2026 both r4nt.com and its companion site blog.r4nt.com had been dark for years — the live WordPress installs were long gone, the theme files unrecoverable from any running server, and what remained on the public web was a partial static export with broken images, dead Flash embeds, and HTML entities everywhere you looked. Rebuilding it was less “migrate a site” and more an archaeological pass through whatever pieces survived.

The salvage list, in the order each piece turned up:

1. A November 2008 phpMyAdmin SQL dump of the magazine
2. A flat HTML mirror of the live site, useful for gap-filling anything the dump pre-dated
3. A September 2015 wp-db-backupdump of the blog — in a different SQL dialect, missing the users table entirely
4. A folder dump of the blog’s entire wp-content/ tree with 32 MB of original uploads

None of these were complete on their own. Stitched together, they cover the full nine-and-a-half year run.

A lot of the work was in the seams. The dumps were nominally UTF-8 but carried stray Windows-1252 punctuation bytes (curly quotes, en-dashes, ellipsis) that turned into U+FFFD replacement glyphs on read; that’s why “Forzani’s Walk/Run” reads properly here instead of as “Forzani Walk/Run”. WordPress shortcodes like [caption] were unwrapped into proper <figure> markup. Flash-era YouTube <object> embeds got converted to modern responsive <iframe>s. Six accidentally-duplicated blog posts (re-imports that WordPress had auto-suffixed with -2) were merged. The four legacy WordPress “page” rows (about, faq, contact, archive) got filtered out of editorial listings while keeping their direct URLs alive.

Image recovery deserves its own paragraph. Magazine media came mostly intact from a copy of the original uploads tree. The blog’s images were a different story — spread across a dead CDN, a long-retired Flickr hostname, and dozens of hot-links to other 2008-era sites that variably survived:

Pre-WordPress flat assets (/blog/wp-content/) were lifted into a media/blog/legacy/ tree alongside everything else.

Author identity got a small but satisfying fix. The WordPress “admin” account on both sites was actually David Gluzman, posting under a stripped-down byline. Folding the two together brought everything he wrote — 281 postsacross nine years — under one name.

The site itself is a Next.js 16 app that reads from a single SQLite file at build time, then renders to fully static HTML. Search runs client-side against a Pagefind index built into the deploy. URLs from the live WordPress era — /article/<slug>, /quick-review/<slug>, /YYYY/MM/DD/<slug> permalinks — all 301 to the new shape, so anything that ever pointed at the old site still resolves.

Hosting is split between two Cloudflare services. The HTML lives on Cloudflare Pages, served from the edge with no server runtime — which means no databases to keep up, no SSL to renew, no patching. The 2.9 GB media library (originals, recovered Wayback grabs, theme art, the lot) lives on Cloudflare R2 behind a custom domain at media.r4nt.com. R2 has free egress to Cloudflare-fronted domains, so serving the magazine’s imagery costs essentially nothing. The whole archive could plausibly run untouched for the next twenty years on a few cents a month.

Editorial corrections happen via a small admin tool that only ever runs locally on the maintainer’s laptop — edits commit to git, GitHub triggers a Cloudflare Pages build, the static HTML rebuilds itself in about three minutes. There’s no logged-in writable surface anywhere on the public internet. Less to break, less to attack, and the canonical source of every word is just text files in a repo.

How to browse

Start with the full archive, browse all categories or tags, jump to authors, head to the blog, search at the top of any page, or just roll the dice.