Processing the last.interi archive

I have a site at https://last.interi.org. It is the last instance I had, representing a decade of curation and narrative. I’m deconstructing it, moving it into place, and commenting as I go. Here, in this thread. :slight_smile:

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As I begin processing the last.interi archive I already found things I don’t care to keep, but want to save to the Internet Archive for referencing here. That got me thinking about how it will be seen there…

I turned off all the forms. No search boxes, no comments. And removed the background image. It was cute as an online shrine to my blog, but I don’t need to take up more space in long term storage.

Interesting considerations, ne?

I was wondering how I ought to process the posts in the archive. I didn’t want to just do chronological, because that is boring and I can’t be bored during this. I need something to achieve, aside from long term storage of messages.

My first strategy will be to knock out some categories! There were a few core categories that went through multiple instances of the site, such as journal, but I also have a few that have one or two posts, and processing those will be very satisfying. :slight_smile:

And so, I begin with a category called… Webcraft.

At the end there the webcraft category had a single post, preserved at Open Guide to Amazon Web Services – interi.


OMG, I just realized they replace all the links in the page with Wayback Machine links! That makes shoving stuff away a lot easier, since I can just copy those links over! Wayback as Proxy for the win!


I wrote:

I primarily just use S3 for backups, but I’ve considered playing with EC2 instances, but most webcraft I do requires a consistent server life that isn’t compatible with stateless, 12-factor apps.

And of course, given my history of incredibly small edits to READMEs on GitHub, I submitted a patch to this guide removing a single word. :slight_smile:

I am proud of my small edits, but since I posted this in 2016 I’ve completely boycotted Amazon services, and I minimize my interactions on GitHub, even before MS bought 'em.

I just like guides! And look at that guide: GitHub - open-guides/og-aws: 📙 Amazon Web Services — a practical guide

There are up to three guides per topic, with many topics. Where can I get that for actual open tech? I suspect it just needs to be compiled/curated.

I had another category, just four posts, called #changelog : changelog – interi

Two posts were updated for a Piwik instance I used to run at stats.party, and when it was called Piwik.

One of them is a post declaring the creation of the Webcraft category:

We created a talkgroup for webcraft. I’ve been trying to figure out how to best share links, stories and references. It is tough, because I don’t want to spam this blog, but sometimes it is timely and super-interesting. I was going to ask the talkgroup what I should do when I realized the answer was right there…

I encourage folks to use the tags if they post there. I will be using resource to share links that I want to reference later, and which will probably be useful for folks solving the same kind of problems I am. :slight_smile:

Of course since then I don’t even post to a blog initially, I start a discussion here, and refine it for the archive. And I don’t think we use tags that much, but the categories provide enough structure.

The last post was an update for GitLab, which https://allthe.codes used to run. Now @tim operates Gitea at the domain.

I really like the idea of commenting on changelogs, and I found doing it in Discourse is the best I’ve come across. I haven’t been reading a lot of feeds lately, so no updates in #changelog, but I’m sure that will change soon. :slight_smile:

Okay, there is one more category with only four posts, but they are a bit longer and I will need to think about where to stick some of it: Life Hacking – interi

What’s funny about that category? It isn’t about “hacking life”, it’s all email!

Seriously, my own writing and the concerns my clients bring up, I am convinced education around email will have a larger impact than expected.

I put up a message, inviting folks back here:

https://last.interi.org/2019/03/8111/

I also deleted a post, as it was published while I was using talkgroup for comments, and the conversation at Pope Francis should speak up makes it the better document. That will likely turn into something else, and make it’s way back to interi.

Edit: same with dj patil's advice.

A lot of these were posted here to talkgroup, so that’s kinda cool: I don’t have to copy and paste them, and I can remove them from the archive fairly easy.

Well, not this one: Women's March in Oakland

It was Clover’s first march, and I got photos of the event. I want to definitely capture this for long term archiving, but I haven’t set up my media library thing I wanted. So… this process is blocked until I set that up!

Each of those photos will have their own media page, and yet no one has suggested what that might look like: What is a photo page? :face_with_monocle:

Deleted the blog post that got cross-posted to Why do we spend so much on the military?.

Also, I started a new recurring task to process that archive. It’s part of a larger plan to explain a lot, but I need to get it settled into place, first.

Ha! I went to trade in the devices for credit, but they weren’t in stock, so I never got one! Not bad, gaming is over, we are in the chillpocalypse of gaming, and we are all scavengers now. :slight_smile:

I wanted to process a bunch of posts at once, and decided it would be easier on my brain if I did it by theme. I noticed that #jabber is at the top of http://archive.v1.talkgroup.xyz/tags. I searched and of course found it on the archive, and had four posts tagged. Here they are, with relevant notes:

Processed #xmpp. If you look at the earliest posts (some go back to 2008) you’ll see some ridiculous assertions! :slight_smile:

Anyhow, rather than refute all of them here, I plan on processing tags at a time and mentioning that, but waiting to refute them until the next phase.

You know that auto-bumping thing I do with #tech-support and #quest-board? I plan to do that on all the categories, eventually! Knowledge Gardening, 101. Eventually this last.archive will become the oldest reference points by chronology (unless I find some old backup or something…) and it is the basis of one of the meta-projects of talkgroup: the redeconstruction of maiki.

Oh, I imported 8 posts tagged #gaming! These are really neat ones! Because about 8 years ago I was trying to “save video gaming”, and took interesting notes. Well, at least to me. :slight_smile:

The next tag to process is #wordpress… so that’s gonna take a while. Currently I have 15 pages of posts tagged as such, so I’m doing it in 20 minute batches. Most of them are going into #webcraft, so you can check the older posts there. :slight_smile:

Another session of importing #wordpress posts. This was rewarding: I’d kept my library together for over a decade, never lost a file. But my site URL changed, and the database would forget where a file was in the filesystem, and point to an older, dead link.

As I import them I get to fix those links, and then Discourse copies them over and saves them to the CDN, and I’m golden! :slight_smile:

The posts are getting into 2013 for importing #wordpress from the archive. Today something neat happened, though: I posted #logs!

I didn’t change the timestamps on those topics, purposefully. The Logs category is for stashing logs and communicating in real time with others, about a given day.

On any given day, we edit maybe 1 to 3 logs. Folks come and catch up, or comment. But it is more than a rolling edit party. It is a way to understand what was happening in the greater context of our experiences. And so all of my prior logs are up for auditing, at any moment. :slight_smile:

It also means things are gonna get both fun and weird, as I have a lot of titleless blog posts that will create pockets of time to explore. What are your logs doing? :face_with_monocle:

New plan! After processing the archive for a bit, I realized I had a whole bunch of statuses in various years. So it makes sense to timestamp all those statuses together in threads and timestamp them together.

Later, when I refer to them, I’ll be able to easily track which content was posted when. :thinking:

I’m up to August, 2008. It’s neat, @susan has a website and I keep linking to it. I was roleplaying a lot more, but I can already see my coming apart at the blog seams. I was trying to blog in a way that made sense, but the systems I was using were no adequate for my thinking. :slight_smile:

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Finished August '08, starting to see a lot my ideas about webcraft break down in light of the work I was pondering.

Down to 1,000 posts! I’ve been importing based on comments, so I could move over threads that we had there, if everyone participating is on talkgroup.

Actually, I’ve added other’s comments as well. I quote and link to the wayback machine. I normally answer folks, so it is similar to quoting and replying as I do on talkgroup. :slight_smile:

We sure did talk a lot in August, 2013.