Rebuilding the tombstones in my Instagram graveyard

It all started a few weeks ago when I noticed an unexpected spike in the number of pages that could not be found on my website. For a few days I let it ride in the hope that it would resolve itself. Pesky agents, I thought. That didn't happen, so I bit the bullet and opened up a log to see what I could see. What I saw was that all attempts to locate tombstones in my Instagram graveyard were coming up empty. === Sure enough, when I went to take a look, all the media files and most of the thumbnails had just plain vanished. I couldn't believe it, nor could I explain it. I could, however, try to do something about it, once again using Greg Randall's memento-mori, a tool that turns your Instagram export data into a static website. Last time I "tried the incantation for the 'easiest' implementation and blow me if it didn’t chug for a few seconds and then deliver a perfect set of files." Not this time. A series of errors kept me and ChatGPT occupied for a good long while. To begin with,…