[theforum] on milestones and deadlines

William Anderson neuro at well.com
Fri Nov 21 17:40:45 CST 2008


ekm at seastorm.com wrote:
> first:
> 
> new stuff on b.e.o.!!!! HELL TO THE YEAH!!!

/me bows.  More to come, pwomise.  Just to clarify, I've been kinda
curating beo (browsers.evolt.org, if you're unaware) for a few years
now, at very least since aardvark became less active and certainly since
we moved evolt.org from the raq4 to tempest.  I tried to be aggressive
about getting mirrors sorted out to keep general download traffic the
hell away from tempest, since we have a traffic cap there, and for a
while we had a shitload of mirrors.  Over time I've had to retire
mirrors from active duty as they've just become stale or disappeared and
the maintainers disappeared too.  Last month, I noticed that we had two
mirrors left, both in the UK, and one of those had disappeared too
(mirror.ac.uk, fwiw).  I pressed some of my web space into service and
we now have two mirrors (mirrorservice.org in the UK, which used to be
hensa.ac.uk for those interested, and mirrors.zensoft.net in the US).

What's interesting is that beo is still very, very relevant.  My mirror
has spat out 86 gig of downloads this month so far.  Just this month.

I updated the archive the other day by pulling down the flock archive,
and I hope to update netscape with some of their ancient builds from
jwz's revived copy of mcom.com[1] that we're missing from beo, and
recent builds too.

> [snip]
> 
> We were very excited about your b.e.o. content ideas on #evolt; would be
> neato if you outlined them here too....

I can't recall the exact conversation (but I remember the fact we had
one!) but the basic idea would be to have beo transformed into more of a
browser museum (but still called the browser archive, natch), with the
front page focus being not a list of browsers, but a constantly updated
set of articles giving historical details of the browsers we archive.
Naturally that would start out small, but with some community
assistance, and possibly some CC-compatible leeching from wikipedia, it
could be built up quite nicely (and quickly).  The archive would still
be there, and accessible, but it would merely form the backbone of the
archive rather than it's single raison d'etre.

That's my thoughts, anyway, have been since euvolt in 2003 :)

-n

[1] http://jwz.livejournal.com/856745.html



More information about the theforum mailing list