ADM-3A question

[Seth J. Morabito]

Al Kossow via cctalk writes:

> On 8/14/19 8:53 AM, Anders Nelson via cctalk wrote:
>> I hope this thread will be written to a blog post
>
> Buried in a filing cabinet in the basement with a sign that says
> "Beware of Leopard".
>
> Blogs are a stupid way to archive information, almost as stupid as
> putting it on Facebook.

I'm going to respectfully disagree, with some major caveats.

I do agree with some of the sentiment, I think: The web, in general, is
a terrible way to archive information. Moreover, the architecture of the
modern web is such that information archival and retrieval is getting
much worse. I base that opinion on the proliferation of modern
JavaScript frameworks that are designed to build single-page apps, and
make the web virtually impossible to scrape or mirror in an efficient
and simple way.

But that said, the web is still the best we've got for the time being.
And if you eschew those single page apps, simple stacks of hyperlinked
HTML documents are much, much better than nothing.

For example, I have a lot of 3B2 documents and disk images archived on
what is essentially an Apache instance with FancyIndexing turned on and
some custom CSS and .htaccess files. I also maintain a blog on the same
domain (https://loomcom.com/blog/), but every single page is statically
generated at publishing time and absolutely nothing is dynamic. I think
that's a fine (but not great) way to archive information. At least,
better than nothing.

In my dream of dreams, I'd like to see a peer-to-peer network of
archival boxes ensuring the integrity of distributed documents with
shared consensus, very similar to the LOCKSS distributed journal
archival system that Stanford put out. But that's a lot of work and
community building (the latter being harder than the former), so I don't
know how realistic it is.

I the meantime, I'm OK with blogs. Much, much more OK than walled
gardens like Facebook.

-Seth