Hello,
For those of you who may not know me, I'm part of the team of people who look after the overall openguides project and software.
I have this evening brought london.openguides.org back online on a new host, using the database dump from last year that Earle gave me.
This is catalysed both by Earle leaving the project and a discussion that arose at the pub the other weekend - essentially the point was made that there is still a nasty fork between RGL and london.openguides.org, and that there was also much content that had been put on the latter that was temporarily lost. I therefore decided it was best to get the latter back up as soon as possible, if nothing else so the content could be taken from there and put on RGL.
I'm not able to decide for people which guide to use, and I'm also not a Londoner, so I'm only getting involved as as custodian, but I do think that it would be good to look at the situation and decide whether making two London guides is still the best thing, or whether they should be merged again somehow.
Please discuss!
Cheers, Dominic.
P.S. Please also note that the lists have moved to a new host today as well. This means that http://lists.openguides.org/ URLs may not work for you for a day or so until the DNS TTL expires. I apologies that I wasn't able to avoid this, due to the coordination issues of migrating the list quickly.
Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
Hello,
For those of you who may not know me, I'm part of the team of people who look after the overall openguides project and software.
I have this evening brought london.openguides.org back online on a new host, using the database dump from last year that Earle gave me.
Very much appreciated, Dom!
This is catalysed both by Earle leaving the project and a discussion that arose at the pub the other weekend - essentially the point was made that there is still a nasty fork between RGL and london.openguides.org, and that there was also much content that had been put on the latter that was temporarily lost. I therefore decided it was best to get the latter back up as soon as possible, if nothing else so the content could be taken from there and put on RGL.
I'm not able to decide for people which guide to use, and I'm also not a Londoner, so I'm only getting involved as as custodian, but I do think that it would be good to look at the situation and decide whether making two London guides is still the best thing, or whether they should be merged again somehow.
As a Londoner, and as a primary content owner of OGL, I am willing to step up as admin for OGL, and take charge of dealing with moderation and daily spam pollution. I do have the tuits and the motivation.
Dom, could you please let me have the admin password (unless this hasn't changed). Also, I know Earle had shell access to the box hosting OGL, and this was occasionally useful. I don't need this from day 1, but it could be useful.
Regarding the merge, I can use my mirroring tools to script transferring nodes across. Of course I'll do this in a test environment of my own first before doing anything to the live RGL.
Please discuss!
Can I have some input from Kake, Bob and others please about RGL content and direction. I could populate individual categories if you don't want OGL content to be loaded wholesale.
Cheers, Dominic.
P.S. Please also note that the lists have moved to a new host today as well. This means that http://lists.openguides.org/ URLs may not work for you for a day or so until the DNS TTL expires. I apologies that I wasn't able to avoid this, due to the coordination issues of migrating the list quickly.
Thanks again for doing this Dom, I felt it was a very fruitful discussion we had in the Turf the other Saturday.
Cheers,
Ivor.
On Tue 01 Jul 2008, Dominic Hargreaves dom@earth.li wrote:
[...] essentially the point was made that there is still a nasty fork between RGL and london.openguides.org [...] I therefore decided it was best to get the latter back up as soon as possible, if nothing else so the content could be taken from there and put on RGL.
There seems to be a bit of a misconception here, which is bothering me. RGL was never intended as a fork of - or a replacement for - the Open Guide to London.
It's simply a website run by me and Bob, for the pleasure and convenience of us and our friends, which happens to run on the OpenGuides software. It's not any kind of democracy, and I would be quite unhappy if anyone attempted to turn it into The Official London Open Guide Wot Anyone Can Have A Say In.
I mention this not out of pettiness, but because I think it's important for the OpenGuides project that the OpenGuides team aren't seen as asserting any rights or expectations over the content or ownership of the things people choose to do with our software.
Re adding OGL content to RGL - can I ask that nobody decide to be "helpful" and start doing this, please. RGL is a separate thing to OGL and is run and structured in a very different way.
If OGL would like to use RGL data, this is of course fine, as it's available under Creative Commons. There's no need to screenscrape; we have a database dump (updated nightly) at: http://london.randomness.org.uk/dbdump/rgl.sql.gz
Scripts and addons (some of which are London-specific and so unlikely to ever go in core) are at: http://svn.randomness.org.uk/trunk/london.randomness.org.uk/
Kake
On Tue 01 Jul 2008, ivorw edlb-xhdd@xemaps.com wrote:
As a Londoner, and as a primary content owner of OGL, I am willing to step up as admin for OGL, and take charge of dealing with moderation and daily spam pollution. I do have the tuits and the motivation. [...] Can I have some input from Kake, Bob and others please about RGL content and direction. I could populate individual categories if you don't want OGL content to be loaded wholesale.
As mentioned in my other mail, we'd prefer not to have OGL content moved across to RGL. But thank you for the offer.
I've been thinking about what I can do to help OGL out, if it is indeed to be raised from the dead. Would it be useful if I made a list of places on OGL that I know to have closed, or that I've recently verified as still existing, and mailed it to Ivor?
Kake
[Cc back to openguides-dev since this has a wider scope]
On Tue, Jul 01, 2008 at 02:15:47PM +0100, Kake L Pugh wrote:
On Tue 01 Jul 2008, Dominic Hargreaves dom@earth.li wrote:
[...] essentially the point was made that there is still a nasty fork between RGL and london.openguides.org [...] I therefore decided it was best to get the latter back up as soon as possible, if nothing else so the content could be taken from there and put on RGL.
There seems to be a bit of a misconception here, which is bothering me. RGL was never intended as a fork of - or a replacement for - the Open Guide to London.
It's simply a website run by me and Bob, for the pleasure and convenience of us and our friends, which happens to run on the OpenGuides software. It's not any kind of democracy, and I would be quite unhappy if anyone attempted to turn it into The Official London Open Guide Wot Anyone Can Have A Say In.
Okay. I misunderstood then. I was basing my remarks on Ivor's unhappiness with not being able to access the content he'd previously put into OGL; that is probably conflating things somewhat.
I mention this not out of pettiness, but because I think it's important for the OpenGuides project that the OpenGuides team aren't seen as asserting any rights or expectations over the content or ownership of the things people choose to do with our software.
Fair enough. Although we do have some duty/interest as a project in promoting certain qualities (for example, quality of data, openness, accessible/suitable for all-comers) in the guides we promote. When OGL was down, it was referring visitors to RGL, and RGL is also promoted on the project home page. Given your above comments, would it be better to remove the link from the project home page? (I'm really not asking this in an incendiary fashion, I really do want to know people's opinions).
I am also concerned about the possible confusion resulting from offering people two London guides, without explaining how they differ.
Re adding OGL content to RGL - can I ask that nobody decide to be "helpful" and start doing this, please. RGL is a separate thing to OGL and is run and structured in a very different way.
I think it would be useful, to avoid confusion, to explain a bit more about this. Maybe a page on RGL itself (apologies if this is already there and I missed it).
Clearly there is a balance to be struck between independence and the ability for people to use the software how they like (which I strongly support) and providing a unified resource for people to get information about their locality in (see also my dreams about having a central portal site). We should aim to support both these goals.
Dominic.
On Tue 01 Jul 2008, Kake L Pugh kake@earth.li wrote:
I've been thinking about what I can do to help OGL out, if it is indeed to be raised from the dead. Would it be useful if I made a list of places on OGL that I know to have closed, or that I've recently verified as still existing, and mailed it to Ivor?
I JFDIed on the closed ones - wasn't sure what category to use, but you can find it all in Recent Changes. A few of them were moderated, so my edits will still be in the moderation queue.
Kake
openguides-london@lists.openguides.org
-
Dominic Hargreaves -
ivorw -
Kake L Pugh