On Wed 29 Apr 2020, Dominic Hargreaves <dom(a)earth.li> wrote: Yes, sorry that wasn’t announced more widely! I was quite busy at the time of the release[*], couldn’t remember how to work the OpenGuides website, and didn’t have time to figure it out. Apparently I also forgot that openguides-dev existed. I think bob did put it on Twitter. I have a feeling I’ve made this plea here before, but speaking as a local historian, I don’t think these websites should just be deleted. I agree that it needs to be made very clear that the information isn’t current (didn’t london once have a banner at the top of every page saying this?), but all three of the above are useful sources for local historians, and surely london is also of some interest to historians of technology. bob is happy to host the sites if Dom doesn’t want to do it any more, and if bob is hosting them then I’m happy to admin them. Kake [*] Incidentally, this was mainly due to working on an OpenGuides site, i.e. Croydon In The 2010s, which is the new name for the Completists’ Guide to Croydon.

Oops, time passed (anyone else finding that's happening these days?) On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 01:43:47PM +0100, Kake wrote: London has a message on the front page, but I think that is not as useful. True, it wouldn't be hard to update the templates, so I'll do that soonish, and try and tidy up Oxford and Cambridge (spoiler alert, when I started to do this the other week, I ended up breaking the database, so it's currently offline awaiting time to resurrect it). 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. Something to think about, anyway. On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 05:14:18PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote: > On 29/04/2020 13:43, Kake wrote: > > > > Neither cambridge, london or oxford are being actively used or > > > maintained by anyone, as far as I know, for many years, so it's > > > probably time I (not-so?)-gracefully turn them all off. > > I have a feeling I’ve made this plea here before, but speaking as a > > local historian, I don’t think these websites should just be deleted. > > Did you know that the British Library has a programme for archiving > websites? Provided that they are primarily original-content-driven then they > want to archive even personal sites (they're archiving my cricket blog > <https://larvalstageumpire.sport.blog/>, for example), so Openguides sites > would certainly qualify. They may already be aware of the OG sites, but if > not they're happy to take nominations from the public for sites to archive. > See here: > https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/uk-web-archive 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. Cheers Dominic

On 19/05/2020 20:12, Dominic Hargreaves wrote: Most of their archived web content is deliberately only available in their reading rooms. archive.org is also a good choice, although I wouldn't trust them to keep content for hundreds of years as much as I would trust the BL. It trades longevity and permanence for accessibility. -- David Cantrell