On Tue 19 May 2020, Dominic Hargreaves dom@earth.li wrote:
If they are truly read-only, and can be cleaned up, there overhead in running them is small. But on the other hand, running the software is probably not the most effective way to set up an long-lived archive. A static HTML export, either hosted locally, or being hosted by one of the options discussed below, would make more sense.
Yes, in the long run I want to do a static export of the Croydon site. I’m keeping it running on OpenGuides for now since I’m still adding historical information and also I’d like to transition the page titles over to addresses as the current businesses close (which... is going to happen faster than usual, I suspect, since quite a lot of them aren’t going to make it through all this).
A couple of examples: https://croydon.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?20_Park_Street https://croydon.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?17_London_Road
I’m wondering if doing something similar for Oxford would be a good idea. A fair bit of it could probably be done remotely using Street View. If you don’t want to leave the sites open for all public editing, you could do something like I’ve done for the Croydon one, which has editable and non-editable versions running off the same database.
[archiving projects]
This is very interesting, although it didn't strike me as being the most accessible set of sites (quite a lot of clicking around to find content that was actually available to the public). I was going to suggest the archive.org as being good enough.
I’m not sure it actually is good enough for the purposes of local historians, since the archived sites aren’t searchable and AFAIK aren’t indexed by Google either. Fine if you already know that an Oxford Guide exists (and its URL), no good if you’re websearching for info about Oxford in the past, or about a specific pub/whatever.
Kake