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BAVATUESDAYS

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“DOMAINS IN THE CLOUD” AT VANDERBILT

Posted on November 5, 2021 by Reverend

The Reclaim Hosting team has our first get together since 2019 (the Domains 2019
conference) after any such travel possibilities were impossible since the
pandemic. It’s been over two years since we have met up in physical space, and
this time we choose to converge as a team in Music City. Reclaim is soon to be
11 people strong, 7 of which were able to make it to Nashville in person. Lauren
Hanks, Pilot Irwin, and myself came in a day earlier to get a campus visit in at
Vanderbilt University before the team “retreat” got going.



The occasion to visit Vanderbilt was fortunate happenstance given I have been in
discussions with Mickey Casad, Executive Director of the Vanderbilt Center for
Digital Humanities, around a project she is working on and I was wondering if it
might make sense to meet up. Admittedly, part of this was selfish given Lauren
and I love to visit campuses given it helps reconnect and ground the work we do
at Reclaim. What’s more, I am a sucker for a beautiful campus, and Vanderbilt is
just that: gorgeous quad with rarefied buildings smack down in the middle of a
happening city. Not a bad re-entry into the campus visiting circuit.





After talking with Mickey it turns out the folks at Vanderbilt were in much the
same mindset, having foregone any on-campus events like this since Spring 2020,
so it was a shared return, and like I imagine many post-pandemic meet-ups will
be—it was both face-to-face and virtual given an entire contingent joined via
Zoom. It was good to be back!

A couple of other things I relished from the visit were catching up with Derek
Bruff, who now adds Assistant Provost to his list of titles at Vanderbilt. I met
him last at an ALT Lab conference in 2015, so it was super cool to find him in
the room, and online tweeting!





Another highlight was getting to hear Lauren Hanks present about Domain of One’s
Own to this group. She’s been with Reclaim for a while, and with every year
takes on a bigger role in our organization and its success. An absolute honor to
work beside here, and I have to say COVID-19 to not dull her presentation chops.
She was as good as I have seen her yesterday, and it is really cool to see how
comfortable, thoughtful, and personally-targeted her talk about the simple
experience of exploring your own domain on the web. She captured brilliantly how
much the magic of the web is a personal journey of intellectual discovery.

What’s more, it was cool to have one of our recent hires, Pilot Irwin (who was a
Domains admin at Carleton College), on the ground taking it all in and
fact-checking my ass given I am not to be trusted with acronyms and code base
discussions 🙂

That’s right, the final highlight would be my taking yet another crack and
trying to pull together a cogent discussions of cloud computing and the shift of
computing resources to a utility model, the rise of next-generation applications
beyond the LAMP stack, and the shift to container-based infrastructure that
should revolutionize the idea of a sandbox for higher ed’s edtech, libraries IT,
and digital humanities groups—to name just a few.



I tried to use a quick clip from Stephen Fry’s illustrated explanation of Cloud
Computing from 2013, but I messed up the audio setup, my bad. That said, This is
the first time I returned to this topic in earnest for a while. I first tried
something like this at the University of Oklahoma in 2015, and it failed given I
was getting too technical and was not entirely clear what I was arguing. I took
another shot at it in 2016 with a Networked Learning virtual event, but that was
not satisfying either. Since then I’ve been pretty much heads-down, full-time
helping to keep the growing ship that is Reclaim Hosting floating along
smoothly, making exploratory presentations less and less a focus. I do miss
presenting to folks in-person, and it is the closest I will ever get to being a
performer, which is something I enjoy. What’s more, using these occasions to try
and connect and explain things that have eluded me for years is invaluable.

So anyway, I do thinking I was able to get some of these things across
yesterday, and I actually jotted down the entire talk in text first, and then
filled with images and presented on the fly. But the text as a frame to work
from was really useful, so I will copy the slides and text below, and hopefully
get to re-visit and refine this talk and take it on the road to start getting
out in front of Reclaim Cloud—my new Reclaim love affair 🙂



I starting by quoting Tim who often notes “There is no cloud, it’s just someone
else’s computer.” While true, I think the idea here was to try and make a deeper
dive to try and explain Reclaim Cloud in regards to the idea of usage-based
computing, or computing as utility. So this is when I moved to the minute long
clip from Stephen Fry’s Cloud Computing explanation:



From there I noted that the utility nature of cloud is no longer anything new to
higher education institutions, noting that most IT organizations in higher ed
are already using services like AWS, Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, and/or Azure
in some fashion. In fact, the predominance of infrastructure like AWS is no
longer simply rarefied IT. Noting that just recently Kathleen Fitzpatrick of
MSU’s MESH are looking for an AWS administrator to run their Humanity Commons
project, underscoring this is not an IT department position and is also an
exploratory position for the group.





My assertion is that this increasingly become a norm for edtech, digital
humanities and other academic computing groups around higher ed.



I think tried to dig in on how cloudlets and reserved computing resources work
in Reclaim Cloud, but after talking with Lauren and Pilot this might have been
the weakest part given I was keeping things conceptual and did not need to jump
into a cloudlet explanation at this point, should maybe have waited for the
demo, or not at all.

After that I asked the question “Why Reclaim Cloud?” To which I said:

Reclaim Cloud was born out of us not being able to meet the needs of our
community beyond the LAMP stack, which was (and arguably still is) the most
popular open source stack behind PHP applications like WordPress, MediaWiki,
Drupal, Omeka, etc.



At the same time, programming languages like Node.js, Ruby, Java, Go, and many
others were becoming increasingly more popular and they depend on entirely
different technology stacks, making hosting applications like Jupyter, Ghost,
Minecraft, Discourse, R Studio, ShinyApps, Etherpad, a hard no from Reclaim. We
were cPanel shop almost exclusively, and while the power it provides is
apparent, as you saw in Lauren’s presentation, the demand for applications that
ran on different infrastructure was not going away.



What’s more, the cloud is not so much someone else’s computer as it is their
container 🙂

The big shift we happening alongside the explosion of cloud computing and
next-generation applications beyond the lamp stack, was the rise of
container-based infrastructure. And this is where the three elements discussed
here (usage-based resource allotment, next-generation applications, and
containerized infrastructure) provides a deeper sense of what the cloud is.

The virtualization that enables containers allows for the provisioning of
numerous, variegated and bespoke technology stacks almost instantly and all on
the same server. The shipping container metaphor is apt, the ship (the server)
carries independent, self-contained applications that all function independently
within a unique tech stack-but share a common set of protocols that allows them
co-exist.



After that it was time to explore the Reclaim Cloud with a quick demo, and I
show off the marketplace installers and used the Docker Hub link to find and
install OwnCast on the fly, so that was awesome. Below are the points I wanted
to hit, but only covered a few, but think this is a good template for any
upcoming presentations cause blogging is #4life!

Demo of Reclaim Cloud:

 * Look at installing an application from marketplace, talk about how each is a
   different stack that can almost instantly run on the Reclaim Cloud server
   thanks to container technology
 * Look at the ability to create a stack from scratch across multiple
   programming languages
 * Demo the ability to install Docker engine and pull a Docker container in from
   scratch
 * Cloudlets and pay as you go pricing
 * Collaborative feature
 * Moving environments seamlessly between users
 * Mapped domains, SSL certificates, etc.

I also wanted to speak to how MSU uses Reclaim Cloud as a sandbox, but that did
not come up until the following discussion, but here are my points there:

Look at how MSU uses Reclaim Cloud as a next-generation sandbox to explore
applications they might recommend MSU’s IT department host for the broader
community:

-Using applications like Discourse forum, Mattermost, Jitsi, Etherpad,
and Custom Docker apps -> https://valuessorter.humetricshss.org/

And that is a fairly solid template for future talks on Reclaim Cloud, I do
think it is starting to come together, but I need to do some more research and
reading to make it even tighter, but it does finally feel like progress after 6
years of trying to communicate an idea.

Posted in presentations, Reclaim Cloud | Tagged Containers, digital humanities,
presentations, reclaimcloud, Vanderbilt University | Leave a comment


GYRUSS AND ROBOTRON IN THE RECLAIM CLOUD

Posted on October 27, 2021 by Reverend

There is some stream-crossing going on in the Reclaim universes as our most
recent shared hosting servers were named after 1980s arcade cabinets. That
should keep the server naming fun for a little while, although this switch also
serves a practical function. Changing the names of our servers to arcade games
like Gyruss and Robotron will help us identify if a shared hosting server is
hosted on Reclaim Cloud or Digital Ocean, where our punk-themed servers live.

The value of Reclaim Cloud for hosting our managed hosting and Domain of One’s
Own instances was apparent quite early on, and that has proven a huge boon for
immediate scaling of resources and storage while keeping server costs under
control. So pushing shared hosting servers to our cloud marks a further
investment in shifting our infrastructure to an elastic cloud, kind like what
the digital revolution of the 80s arcade cabinets meant for the future of gaming
🙂

It’s crazy to think Reclaim Cloud has been live and available for over a year
now; its value to us as a company has been huge in terms of expanding our
options. What’s more, it has pushed everyone at Reclaim to step-up their comfort
level with managing containers and supporting cloud native applications. It’s a
brave new world, and the fact that Jelastic was recently acquired by Virtuozzo
after a 10-year partnership points towards a broader push in this direction
across the entire hosting landscape.

That said, changes like this raise questions around existing licensing and
pricing models. One thing that’s become painfully apparent over the last several
years is that the cost of software in this field (whether cPanel, WHMCS,
CloudLinux, ZenDesk, etc.) has gone up significantly. Our monthly software bill
has nearly quadrupled over that time period, so paying attention to changing
business models around software as we commit to providing a cloud-based option
to the Reclaim faithful becomes increasingly important. Sometimes you kinda feel
a bit like Robotron: the last human defense against the robot revolution 🙂

Posted in reclaim | Tagged reclaimhosting, server | Leave a comment


PHOENIX BUG OR EASTER EGG?

Posted on October 19, 2021 by Reverend

Last night I had a moment, and it was awesome!





As I was playing Phoenix in my foyer, as I am wont to do after work, and
something happened I thought I might have hallucinated from my quarter-stealing
days in Baldwin, Long Island happened: as the birds were ascending on the second
lap of my second run through the game’s stock 4 stages I shot three or four
birds in quick succession and was awarded 200,000 points and a second free guy
(I believe I already got the first). It was amazing!



I vaguely remembered this was a possibility, but at the same time thought it may
have been some kind of 80s video game lore akin to the 13th level in the “Bishop
of Battle” episode of Nightmares. Turns out it is true, and it is even
documented in the games’s Wikipedia article as a bug:

> When the player shoots three birdlike enemies in a row very quickly as they
> fly upwards, the total score is set to a value in the vicinity of 204,000
> points.[17]

Bug or Easter egg? Either way it marks a new high score for me on Phoenix,
blowing away my previous 65,610, which to be fair was still my best game to
date. Maybe another screenshot of the new hi score is in order 🙂



How about another for posterity?



I kid. But while I do have a freeplay chip for Phoenix I installed recently, I
don’t have a hi-score save kit for Phoenix. That means this score vanished after
I turned it off, but thanks to a brilliant KLOV community member in the UK a
custom hi-score save kit is being made for my Phoenix as I write this. I hope I
can reproduce this “bug” and maybe even get to 300K?! One can still dream after
50, right?

Posted in bavacade, bavarcade | Tagged bavacade, hi-score, Phoenix | Leave a
comment


RECLAIM HOSTING AND THE SPACE OF POSSIBILITY

Posted on October 14, 2021 by Reverend

About a week ago Hosting Advice published an article featuring Reclaim Hosting.
It was pretty cool given it is the second article Hosting Advice published about
Reclaim, the first being back in 2016 when we were just getting our legs. It’s
interesting to reflect where we are 5 years later, and one of the biggest, most
welcome differences is the visibility and leadership of Lauren Hanks in the
recent article. The relevance of Reclaim Hosting is premised on the growth of
the folks that work with us, and it that regard I believe we are continuing to
grow. The Reclaim is really starting to take shape and I believe by year’s end
we will be in a position to start being far more pro-active to the demands of
growth and scaling, a process made trickier by our insistence on resisting
outside funding and investment.

In this regard, the recent article tells a story of a company working to provide
new services, while simultaneously preserving a sense of personal service and
attention that made us compelling from the start. Forgetting your community and
turning your back on what made you relevant to begin with often goes
hand-in-hand with venture capital investment, and we have seen it all too
regularly in edtech. At the heart of this, at least for me, is the fact that
Reclaim Hosting continues to lead with support and follow-up with a promise that
cheap or free, while crucial, is not just a way to get your foot in the door or
promote open educational resources, it’s a commitment to a community around
providing them the tools and resources to build their own world online outside
the online architecture of data extraction that everywhere surrounds us:

> “I do think there’s a bigger question to be asked about how far we can go with
> free before it either catches up to us or we’re selling more than just student
> data, and we’re giving away the farm,” Jim said. “When you’re a hosting
> company, what’s your responsibility to the sacredness of that data?”
> 
> This is Reclaim’s perspective on data monetization — something Jim said he is
> very proud of.
> 
> “We try and keep as much of that outside of the relationship,” he said. “They
> pay for a service, and that’s what they get. And there’s no additional
> extraction of information.”

It’s a privilege and an honor to continue to provide a service to the
educational community that I’m proud of. It gets me up in the morning and puts a
smile on my face. There is no casuistry needed when explaining this: we provide
a space of possibility for faculty, students, and staff to build a better web.

Posted in reclaim | Tagged reclaim | Leave a comment


50

Posted on October 14, 2021 by Reverend

It seems like just yesterday I was blabbing about turning 48, but so it goes in
blog years. I’ve used this space to track time over the last 16 years or so, and
it truly does feel like my site of record. I’ve watched a bunch of folks I grew
up with celebrating this landmark passage into old age on Facebook and it seems
deeply depressing to me, it’s like having your 50th birthday party at Chuck E.
Cheese.

Nothing beats the blog, it’s a space where I’m not afraid to admit this was a
weird one for me. I’ve spent much of my 40s trying to recover both physically
and financially from my 20s and 30s. My 40s ruled, in large part because the
scales dropped from my eyes when it came to institutional servitude: I started
Reclaim Hosting, left UMW, moved to Italy, spent much more time with my family,
and even got into collecting arcade games.

I also came to terms with the fact I don’t have world enough and time and I need
to start thinking beyond my EDUPUNK guns. Being sober for almost all of this
time helped tremendously, and accepting my manic depression and learning to live
with it made me a better husband, father, colleague, and, hopefully, mentor.
You’re never cured of your brain, and those of us who regularly struggle to
trust it might even become stronger for it. It’s kinda like Venom, you learn to
live with, and maybe even control, the alien invader within.

In that sense, the passing of time has been a godsend for accepting my real hard
limits as a person and doubling down on what I enjoy (and might even be decent
at). But time looms, and while 50 is symbolic and it’s only a number and all
that new age shit, I was young once and I know 50 isn’t that. In fact, we live
in a delusional moment where we believe enough mountain climbing and dog walking
can counter-act our fate, but I know the cold, hard reality is still out there
and it tolls for me! I’m honestly not sure what this next set of numbers will
bring my way, hence the idea of this being a weird one, but I do hope the
personal and professional work I put in over the last decade makes whatever
comes my way that much more manageable, or even enjoyable!

50 fucking years old, old man bava and the blog 🙂

Posted in bavatuesdays, blogging | Tagged old | 43 Comments


CATCHING UP WITH THE JOY OF DS106

Posted on October 5, 2021 by Reverend

It’s been a while since I posted about this semester’s Bob Ross-inspired
instantiation of ds106, but, like Luther, I’ve been busy!



Looks like the last weekly video I posted was over a month ago for week 3, so
below are the weekly intros from week 4 through week 8 that Paul Bond and I have
been producing for the class. I think we have this week off for Fall break, so a
good time to catch up. While definitely not high art, I do enjoy doing this 7-8
minute intros weekly. I get to see and breifly comment on student work, produce
Paul’s weekly missives, and also play the ornery public access TV produce. That
is retirement in a nutshell 🙂

The Joy of ds106: Week 4


The Joy of ds106: Week 5


The Joy of ds106: Week 6


The Joy of ds106: Weeks 7 & 8


I nice element of the last two videos is that with streaming built into Peertube
I can simply stream our session from there and an archive lives on at the URL
that Paul can then share with the course. It is readily apparent the Paul
scripts his stuff and I just parachute in, setup OBS Ninja, and do the
recording—but the nice piece is it makes it easy and we can get the whole thing
done in 20 minutes tops each week. If you can’t make art, at least make it easy,
dammit 🙂

Posted in digital storytelling | Tagged ds106, PeerTube | Leave a comment


RECLAIM ARCADE: CAP KIT FOR A K4900

Posted on September 27, 2021 by Reverend

Last week Tim and I did some Reclaim Arcade repairs, this time replacing the
capacitors (often referred to as a cap kit) for the monitor chassis of a Wells
Gardner K4900. I wanted to see Tim do a full cap kit given I’m going to do a G07
cap kit here soon. I am particularly attuned to some of his tricks, like reading
negative/positive for capacitors, marking all replaced capacitors with a blue
Sharpee, reading fully through instructions in cap kit before hand, etc.

?

I’m also pretty happy with this recording. We had some connection issues in the
back office using Reclaim Arcade’s internet in previous videos, so for this one
Tim ran the connection off the phone. It was solid, and we also decided to use
obs.ninja for the camera on the workbench so any connection issues with the
robot would not effect the work camera capturing the majority of the action and
audio. The Robot was for establishing shot and for Tim and I chatting
“face-to-face.”

One note on the recording of this video is that it was streamed using the live
stream feature of Peertube through bava.tv. Which means it also captured
everything and immediately publishes it once the stream ends for posterity,
which is really nice.



We did not have the ability to test the chassis during this video because of
time constraints. Although we did capture the test of this cap kit in the above
video. Turns out the chassis was still not working given there was video
collapse, and as we discovered during the cap kit the chassis was literally
cracked at a key spot, and is probably destined for parting out for our other
K4900 chassis. While a bit of a bummer, every project is crucial for learning
how to repair these old games given it is an ongoing labor of love.

Posted in Reclaim Arcade | Tagged capkit, K4900, reclaimarcade | Leave a comment


PEERTUBE’S LIVE STREAMING OPTION

Posted on September 21, 2021 by Reverend

I have been working on a side project that will be using Peertube and as a
result realized after installing the latest version that this awesome open
source software now includes live streaming. I’ve been playing around a bit with
live streaming apps like Owncast recently, so this was pretty exciting. I tried
live streaming a VHS tape I was archiving, and was blown away by the minimal
buffering. The stream was solid!





In fact, I tried another version of the same VHS archive with some audio filters
on the incoming signal and got a solid archive for posterity:



A nice part of this setup is you can choose between streaming to a unique URL
that archives the video at the same namespace for posterity or you can have a
consistent URL (what they call permanent live) dedicated to streaming from a
single URL for an ongoing event that you can stream to multiple times from
different sources. So the fact it has the option between one and done archiving
and permanent live stream boiled-in is quite nice.

Live Settings for Peertube’s live streaming option released with version 3.0

As of now there is no live chat as part of a stream in Peertube, which is a deal
breaker for many who want a Youtube or Twitch alternative. But have no fear
because this is open source software and someone is developing a livechat plugin
for Peertube. I will be playing with that later this week, so I’ll definitely
share what I learn. Below is a quick overview I recorded of Peertube’s live
stream if you are interested in seeing more.



When I realized this functionality was available I knew I had to upgrade bava.tv
to the latest version of Peertube. I was apprehensive because I haven’t had much
luck upgrading Docker containers, but luckily the upgrade instructions were
clear and worked beautifully. One of the things I realized is that the latest
version of Peertube is using Nginx for the  reverse-proxy as opposed to Traefik
(which my install was using). This led to an issue opening up port 1935 for the
stream, but luckily the great Chris Blankenship bailed me out after I asked for
help in Reclaim’s community forums. So, I am running bava.tv on Peertube 3.0
with traefik as the reverse-proxy and everything is working well, which is
awesome!

Posted in bava.tv, Reclaim Cloud, Streaming | Tagged bava.tv, PeerTube,
reclaimcloud, streaming | 4 Comments


PHOENIX FREEPLAY AND SCRAMBLE HIGH SCORE SAVE KIT

Posted on September 19, 2021 by Reverend

This week I mustered up the courage to try replacing chips on game boards and
soldering sockets. This was fairly new territory for me, but I’ve been watching
Tim work (as well as many Youtube videos) and taking notes, so it was time to
take the leap. I started small and easy with simply replacing a couple of ROMs
on my Phoenix PCB game board to add the freeplay functionality thanks to Jeff’s
Romhack.

ROM 48 replacement on Phoenix PCB

I have to admit this was fairly easy, I just had to carefully remove two
socketed ROMs numbered 45 and 48, and then be sure to replace them with the
modified ROMs making sure the notch was aligned the right way.

Align notches of replacement chips to ensure they are all facing the same way

One of the things you figure out (which is useful info) is these chips are
stronger than you think, and they can take a bit of push and pull. That said,
the fear of breaking off a leg is real. I did have to pull chip 48 back out gain
given one of the legs did not align, but other than that it was quite painless
given there was no soldering required, just pull out the old chips and insert
the new ones.

ROM 45 replacement on Phoenix PCB

So with the Phoenix free play ROMs in, I was ready to return to the last bit for
my Scramble restore, namely installing the high score save kit with free play I
ordered this summer. This should have been simple like the Phoenix ROMs swap,
but the snag with this one was the 40-pin Z80 processor on the Scramble board
was soldered in and I couldn’t simply pop it out. I needed to desolder it, and
then solder in a socket that the high score save kit could plug into. Trick was
I needed to make sure the Z80 chip came out cleanly cause that was going to be
seated in the mod chip set for the high score save kit.

My first desoldering and re-soldering job on a 40-pin Z80 socket. Not pretty,
but it worked.

So I was a bit nervous, but I decided to bite the bullet yesterday and desolder
the pins for the Z80 processor, which was a royal pain in the ass. It wouldn’t
come out cleanly, and I was afraid to break it with too much force. I must have
desoldered the pins five times. Eventually I got the chip out relatively clean
and was able to solder in the socket:

Soldered 40-pin socket, you can see the signs of me trying to remove the z80
chip on the board 🙂

It felt pretty good to get this far, but now I had to seat the Z80 chip into the
high score save kit, and then plug that into the socket:

Scramble High Score Save Kit Z80 chip plugged into mod kit

So the Z80 went in cleanly, and you can see on the other side of the high score
save kit there is a 40 pin that sits in the socket I soldered:

Underside of high score save kit

With all that done, I was now ready to test the board. Moment of truth, and on
the first go I got garbage on the monitor, and amongst the scrambled graphics I
saw the term PLOOOP. I thought that might help with a search for a fix, but I
got nothing. So I went back over the pins I soldered and turns out I missed one
(I could tell because it was loose), so I re-soldered it and tried again. Not
feeling all that optimistic I re-connected the PCB and BAM—the high score save
kit was working!

Freeplay working in Scramble

High Scores saving in Scramble

This may have been the most rewarding arcade project yet, simply because I never
thought it would work. If you would have told me I’d be desoldering and
re-soldering 40-year old arcade circuit boards I would have laughed. But if you
will it, it is no dream!

Posted in bavarcade, video games | Tagged bavacade, HSS, scramble | 1 Comment


THE SISYPHEAN LABOR OF LINK LOVE

Posted on September 16, 2021 by Reverend

I woke up this morning to a Twitter exchange between Alan Levine and Ken Bauer
about creating a plugin that points dead links on a blog to the Internet
Archive’s Wayback Machine:





I do believe my career as a plugin developer is under-rated, never built a bad
one 🙂 That said, I did dabble with the plugin Amber, as Tim reminded me, for
archiving links both on my site as well as on the Internet Archive, but it was a
lot of database overhead and was seemingly inconsistent on WordPress
Multisite—so it fell by the wayside.

I’m sure Alan will blog the wonders of how he is augmenting the WordPress Broken
Link Checker plugin to point folks at the Internet Archive and I, for one, would
immediately install any fork he created. Alan blogged an early example of this
plugin modification on his Secret Revolution blog, which in turn linked to this
blog post on the bava that then sent me down a rabbit hole of link rot
maintenance—a task that will never end until I die, but is oddly comforting in
the meantime.

Turns out the article Brian Lamb and I published with the Open University of
Catalonia in 2009, “The un-education of a technologist,” was no longer available
resulting in a dead link. No problem, I thought, we created a site for the
article with all the content at http://unartist.wpmued.org, but when I went
there this morning it was throwing a cPanel error. Oh noes!

> My Advancing Web Years: Issues with Trading my WPMS Mansion for a Florida
> Condo



I immediately knew what the issue was, I had started dismantling my WordPress
Multisite instance (http://wpmued.org) several years ago to pull out
bavatuesdays, my personal site jimgroom.net, and a few others, but forgot this
one. I still had the database and all the files, so I pulled it out of the
multisite and stood it up again, and will probably site sucker it up into
straight HTML for the most reliable long-term archive. And that, dear reader, is
the Sisyphean labor of maintaining the integrity of your blog over the long
haul. It’s work I deeply enjoy, but can understand it being overhead for many.
So making it easier and better is important and I’m glad Alan is always mindful
of the long history of the web we inhabit.

> Digital Structures: Institutions Abandon / Individuals Preserve



The detour this morning also made me aware that one of my favorite ds106 videos
from back in the day, “News on the March,” I’d linked to in that post from 2015
was now private. I had asked the student on several occasions to make it public
again, and he always obliges but that can get annoying. So I finally uploaded my
version to bava.tv, and embedded that across my blog so it is available apart
from Youtube, which makes me very happy.



While searching for that video I noticed that many videos I had linked to for
ds106 were no longer working because Youtube had changed their link/iframe
structure, so I had a ton of dead links I needed to update, so I then started
work on that, and will soon do a database find and replace. Which reminded me
how happy I am to have my own little Youtube clone through Peertube that allows
me to store and archive all the videos I watch and create. It’s been a
game-changer for me, and I quickly archived those ds106 videos on my Peertube
instance cause you can never have enough copies.



In fact, as much as I love the Internet Archive, and I do, I like even better
the idea we each have some kind of spider tool for the links on our site, like
the Amber plugin mentioned earlier, so that there are copies and backups beyond
the Internet Archive. Depending too much on one site may prove problematic in
the long run, or just unevenly distributed in terms of what you did or didn’t
want as part of your personal archive.

Posted in Archiving, digital storytelling, Instructional Technology | Tagged
Amber, archive, archive video, archive.org, ds106, edtech, Internet Archive,
PeerTube | 4 Comments
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