[theforum] Zombie!

William Anderson neuro at well.com
Tue Jun 18 02:31:45 CDT 2013


I guess from the stunning lack of reaction (other than that already
given), there's not much interest in doing much with evolt anymore.

On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 3:54 PM, David <david at gigawatt.com> wrote:
> Hi Neuro!

Hi Dave!

> On 6/2/13 10:42 AM, William Anderson wrote:
>> I have a suggestion just as I've both reactivated my evolt.org
>> donation subscription (Dave K, for your books, $20/month sir!) and
>> have been working on reconstructing the Browser Archive to include
>> funky stuff like external mirrors to nominally save us space and
>> increase our coverage (I'm hoping to get some stuff into github soon).
>
> Thanks for both kinds of contributions.  This makes you evolt's largest
> financial benefactor *and* most productive worker :-)

*gulp* :)

> Expenses:
>
>   SoftLayer (Hosting): $45 /month
>   GoDaddy ~ $20 / year (two domains: evolt.org and evolters.org)

Do we still need evolters.org?  I notice it still points to the
now-switched-off tempest.

FWIW, I've registered browserarchive.org to potentially play host beo
as either an alternate venue or as an escape route should consensus be
that evolt in entirety should be no more (although I don't think
that's the case at the moment).

>> Folks, why are core evolt.org pages not being rendered without
>> authenticating first? (I had to sign in to reach the donate page!)
>
> The Drupal user table keeps getting corrupted, causing uid 0 to become
> associated with a (newly registered, semi-random) authenticated user account
> that has a password.  I have fixed this several times in the past.  Drupal
> so sucks.

Aha, OK.  Didn't know that.

>> Are we considering doing the upgrade to the latest version of Drupal,
>> whatever that may be?
>
> See above :-)

:)

>> Are we going to reconsider our hosting platform to save some money?  I
>> think the hosting bill is still around the ~ $45 a month mark, a cost
>> which could get us a virtual machine with similar if not increased
>> storage on Amazon Web Services[...]
>>
>> I think AWS makes more sense, especially
>> considering the price.
>
> +1 for moving to Amazon EC2
>
> FYI: IBM Just bought our (most recent) web hosting provider, SoftLayer
> (which bought ou account from the ThePlanet, which bought us from
> ServerMatrix)

Yeah, I saw that.

> I can't stomach the idea of hosting evolt with the Men in Black at IBM...

IBM aren't the Watson men they used to be, but yeah, I get your point ;)

> +1 for converting weo content into a static "snapshot" of all the great
> articles of the past.  The word "mothballing", to me, has connotations of
> hiding it in a closet under old boxes of magazines, never to be found again
> :-)  but i get your point of extracting the content from the (shudders) cms
> software in which it is currently imprisoned.

I've been thinking about this over the last couple of weeks while
travelling for work and recovering from The Man Flu.  I admit that a
glorious retool of the community is perhaps an unattainable goal, and
the esteemed Mr. Roselli's archive idea for weo might just be the way
to go, unless someone can come out with a knock-it-outta-the-park idea
on how to revitalise evolt.org that none of us has considered yet.

weo's root page could perhaps be made up like http://info.cern.ch/
(which celebrates the first web page in a very modern looking fashion)
so that the front page is all about the archive, has links to the kind
of "retrospective commentary" we've mentioned already, links to our
own historical lookback, links to a page pointing to the all-important
lists, and links into the "static" articles of evolt's past.  I'm
still thinking that running the articles themselves out of a CMS is
the way to go, as it means the content remains easily searchable
without us having to graft a search engine on top of static content.
With logins, comments, submissions etc all turned off, it should be a
relatively straightforward platform to maintain.  But I appreciate
that a completely static scraped archive could be hosted on almost
anything, anywhere, with minimal upkeep required.

Let's pick one.

>> I know some/most of us have moved on from web design, but that surely
>> doesn't mean this community needs to slowly fizzle out.
>
> +1 to no fizzle

There doesn't seem to be a lot of support for fizzle.

>> Perhaps we
>> can laser focus back on creating a great web design community?
>> Perhaps not solely relying on just mailing lists and submitted
>> articles?
>
> +1 to laser focusing on lists
>
> What happened to the google ads on leo?

they're on the list archive pages, but aren't on the root leo page
(which I note amusingly still has the old design on it)

> I'm all for just making weo an alias for leo and then making leo more
> searchable and browseable and perusable...

There is still merit in weo's existence, even if in a static form.
Also I'd wager that leo has more googlejuice sitting where it is.

>> We have done great things together.  Let's do some more.
>
> +1 to more goof! (I mean good)

Well at the very least, we can tie things up with a neat bow.

> PS: Why does the subject of this thread reference the undead?  Oh, never
> mind.  Now that I ask the question I get it.

Braaaaaaaains.

-n


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