Oops, time passed (anyone else finding that's happening these days?)
On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 01:43:47PM +0100, Kake wrote:
On Wed 29 Apr 2020, Dominic Hargreaves dom@earth.li 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.
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.
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).
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.
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:
On Wed 29 Apr 2020, Dominic Hargreaves dom@earth.li 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 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
openguides-london@lists.openguides.org
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Dominic Hargreaves -
Kake