Public Archives of TD - WIP

[eric]

I've spent some time the past week building an archive project for TD. I wanted to share the progress so far, high level, share some screen shots, and get some feedback. Below is the README from the project. The code will be on our github once we start publishing offline copies.

README

In an effort to preserve posts and show our backups are working, we've created a static site generator that will periodically generate an offline version that can be publicly archived.

It will archive:

• Public posts
• Public profile posts

It will not include:

• Profiles not marked as public
• Person to Person conversations
• Any forums that require login:
  • Trading posts, moderation posts, site admin posts, etc
• Any sensitive or private data

Formats​

HTML​

Simple HTML that should render on any vintage browser.

JSON​

A structured json file of the posts is also included. One could use this to build a full text search offline.

HyperCard​

An ASCII version that is compatible with HyperCard is included along with Stack to read.

To Do:​

• How to handle images/videos
• How to handle attachments
• A way to inject style if wanted
• Use a template engine instead of hard coding HTML?

 

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

Excellent work on this!

So with regards to HyperCard, there’s a lot of flexibility that you can program in, if you do it right.
First, if you can use something like imagemagic to auto convert the images on the site and the avatars, you might be able to make black and white images in PICT format to import into HyperCard.

Additionally, Frederic Rinaldi makes some of the best XCMDs and XFCNs for HyperCard. He sent me his entire archive set, and just gave me permission to upload for preservation to the Macintosh Garden. Among the XCMDs is one for HTTP requests. You could build the stack for System 7+ that downloads the updates from the forum automatically to the user’s stack.

 

[eric]

My current plan is to run this a few days after the 1 year anniversary coming up and post the resulting offline snapshot to archive.org - the hypercard stack will likely not be there as I haven't worked on it since last year, but the text/images/etc will be archived for the future.