Volunteers needed
You know how you’re always wondering how you can help B&W? I have a way. I need volunteers. I have a big job, and doing it all myself is 1) massively tedious and 2) an impediment to doing anything else, like updating B&W and going for long health-giving walks and eating chocolate.
The job is just backing up B&W. I need to archive it, and there are a lot of pages. Nearly 400 articles, about 75 months of Notes and Comment, lots of In Focus, In the Library, Bad Moves, Quotations, the Guide to Rhetoric – and so on. If we divide it up it won’t be so bad. If lots and lots of you step forward it will be hardly anything at all. Email me, and I’ll give you an assignment. Love ya, mean it.
I’m pretty certain that Josh and I can take care of it all. Josh can probably make a tarball of the whole thing; and if there’s any scutwork to be done, well, here I am with what appears to be a herniated disk and *nothing to do*.
Aw, you guys rock. I remembered that Josh had backed it up a couple of years or so ago.
A herniated disk – uggggggggh – hope not.
Josh says, “I have a copy of the site now. It’s important to note the distinction between a *backup* of the site and a *cache* of the site. What I have is a cache, which means that all the pages are there but the interactive functions probably don’t work. It would be possible but difficult to rebuild the site if something catastrophic happened. Probably the only person who can get you a *backup* from which the site can be easily restored is Jeremy or someone with access to a shell on wherever the site is hosted.”
Josh sounds as if he knows what he’s talking about! But if you still need help, let me know what you’re thinking of.
What software do you use for B&W? I’ve never really paid much attention to it before, but it looks like a fairly simple CMS – so backing it up its database should be straight forward.
I run a couple of sites using a CMS and have scripts that back them up daily so I could resurrect them if a catastrophe happened. Sounds like you need something similar.
Alan
Ophelia,
If Jeremy is the webmaster, then this is really something he should do. This shouldn’t be too difficult if he is using a tool like Dreamweaver. He needs to make a copy of the files on the Host site. He should then synchronize the remote (Host) site with his local site (I assume his PC) and then make an extra copy of the local files that make up the site. Then if something goes wrong at the Host site, he should be able to restore it quickly. Let me know if he needs help.
I noticed that B&W doesn’t yet have a Favicon. A Favicon is short for ‘favorites icon.’ When installed at the host site, it will display if someone bookmarks B&W. An icon will appear next to the link in your favorites section of your browser. I’m thinking a little butterfly might be appropriate. I can make one for you if you would like.
Rich R.