Scripting News: Thursday, July 1, 2021

COLLECTED BY

Organization: Archive Team

Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.

History is littered with hundreds of conflicts over the future of a community, group, location or business that were "resolved" when one of the parties stepped ahead and destroyed what was there. With the original point of contention destroyed, the debates would fall to the wayside. Archive Team believes that by duplicated condemned data, the conversation and debate can continue, as well as the richness and insight gained by keeping the materials. Our projects have ranged in size from a single volunteer downloading the data to a small-but-critical site, to over 100 volunteers stepping forward to acquire terabytes of user-created data to save for future generations.

The main site for Archive Team is at archiveteam.org and contains up to the date information on various projects, manifestos, plans and walkthroughs.

This collection contains the output of many Archive Team projects, both ongoing and completed. Thanks to the generous providing of disk space by the Internet Archive, multi-terabyte datasets can be made available, as well as in use by the Wayback Machine, providing a path back to lost websites and work.

Our collection has grown to the point of having sub-collections for the type of data we acquire. If you are seeking to browse the contents of these collections, the Wayback Machine is the best first stop. Otherwise, you are free to dig into the stacks to see what you may find.

The Archive Team Panic Downloads are full pulldowns of currently extant websites, meant to serve as emergency backups for needed sites that are in danger of closing, or which will be missed dearly if suddenly lost due to hard drive crashes or server failures.

Collection: ArchiveBot: The Archive Team Crowdsourced Crawler

ArchiveBot is an IRC bot designed to automate the archival of smaller websites (e.g. up to a few hundred thousand URLs). You give it a URL to start at, and it grabs all content under that URL, records it in a WARC, and then uploads that WARC to ArchiveTeam servers for eventual injection into the Internet Archive (or other archive sites).

To use ArchiveBot, drop by #archivebot on EFNet. To interact with ArchiveBot, you issue commands by typing it into the channel. Note you will need channel operator permissions in order to issue archiving jobs. The dashboard shows the sites being downloaded currently.

There is a dashboard running for the archivebot process at http://www.archivebot.com.

ArchiveBot's source code can be found at https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/ArchiveBot.

TIMESTAMPS

Thursday, July 1, 2021

Poll: Crunchy or smooth peanut butter?#

One day on Houston St in NYC, while I was visiting at NYU for a couple of years, I was standing around, waiting for a student, not doing anything, daydreaming a bit, and all of a sudden there's a gorgeous, dark-haired young woman wearing a black dress, standing immediately in front of me. This is the kind of woman you see in Manhattan, perfectly made up, wearing a black dress that perfectly fits her body. They congregate here, somehow knowing this is where they should be. She is a Master of the Universe, can instantly command the attention of anyone she wants. And this godess wants to speak to me.Me? What. It couldn't be. Must be a mistake. But in an instant, I realized this was the student I was waiting for. Of course she was talking to me. But in that split second my reaction was instinctual, not intellectual, a whole story had played out. I thought of this story the other day, while looking out of my house at a green mountain far in the distance, a field in the foreground, a stand of trees, a huge bird of prey flying overhead. Everything verdant, alive, ideal, perfect as a young confident aloof woman in a black dress in Manhattan. As impossible to describe as a whole. That I could be in such a place, that this scene had assembled itself with me in it, me. Me. How did this happen? At my advanced age, I'm just beginning to understand that I am part of this world. #

Peeve: Someone I'm collaborating with says they'll read my email later because they're busy now. Then they say what they're doing. The point of using asynchronous tools is you don't have to care what I'm doing now, and I don't have to stop everything to do something for you. #

Follow-up on yesterday's braintrust query. Using a regular expression, I find a t.co link in a tweet, and replace it with something smaller and less distracting. Remember this is a writing environment, so the result must be as simple as possible for readers. ?? #

A Tools For Thought use-case: Writing code in an outliner. #

I'm really confused about what's up with archive.org. As I reported on Tuesday, they clearly aren't archiving this blog in any meaningful way. I write this blog with history in mind. I put things here and on the linkblog because I want to be sure historians in the future will find at least one link to this stuff. If archive.org isn't backing it up, that's a big problem. And it raises an even bigger question -- what else aren't they archiving? And how do they decide what to archive and not to archive? Do they run the JavaScript on a page to get a rendering? If not, there's a huge amount of our knowledge that isn't being recorded. Are they trying to be neutral or do their friends and people who donate get preferential treatment? #

I just did the monthly ritual, backing up June's blog, in OPML, on GitHub. BTW, archive.org has one snapshot of the repo, on 11/22/2020. Anything after that is not in their database. (On further examination it seems the only took a snapshot of the top level of the repo, so it doesn't serve as a backup of the content of the blog.)#

The conclusion: archive.org, no matter how good it is and how ethical the people there are, is a last-resort way to backup the web. It can and should get better, but if we want to create a historic record of any kind about this era, we're going to have to be much more deliberate about it, even competitive. There are nothing but holes in our approach, all the way down to the architecture of the net itself, and at every level above it. We've created a very temporary way to record history. And like everything else, we aren't doing anything about it. #

Frida Kahlo#

The Two Fridas. 1939.#

Last update: Thursday July 1, 2021; 10:51 PM EDT.

You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)

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