Re: CHAT: facing your own mortality (as a conlanger)

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 8:23 PM, ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...> wrote:

> If the LCS truly gets off the ground, perhaps it could host web pages (but
> does anything last in perpetuity?), or better, a library of materials in
> print or on microfilm (does anyone still do that?).
>
I believe we could do this. Preservation & enabling presentation of
conlang-related materials is certainly part of our core goals.

We should be taking memberships very soon, and web hosting is likely to be
one of the benefits thereof. Of course there is always variance and we'd
need to figure out what to do if it changes, but in the meantime we have a
very large amount of hosting space available, so long as it is used for a
subdomain of conlang.org. (You could of course still have some other domain
name that points at it also if you like.)

I expect that for at least as long as we are a healthy organization, we'll
be able to do this. With moderate funding (i.e. a membership of a couple
hundred people), we could put aside enough money earmarked just for this to
keep it up for a long time; volume discounts on this sort of thing are quite
large.

(There are a couple caveats. E.g. content / copyright / DMCA disputes would
be between you and the webhost itself, as we have no desire to be involved
in that mess; our host might kick us out if you require something that uses
"too much" CPU/RAM, so if they complain about it, you'd have to stop that.
Host is in the US, so you'd have to abide by US laws. And content of your
site as a whole may need to be at least somewhat related to conlanging,
since there are rules about dealing in "unrelated business" when one is a
nonprofit. But these shouldn't be problems for 99.99% of people.)

Hopefully this'd be an attractive alternative to tripod, geocities, et al.
and help make content more accessible.

It might be a bit less easy to use, however, for people not familiar with
SSH / SFTP based website admin; our host doesn't provide one of those cute
WYSIWYG content-creation tools. But you could create it elsewhere (eg
GooglePages) and upload that, or install WordPress or Joomla or the like and
use that.

In any case, the short answer is: yes, we could do that.

- Sai

P.S. Rick - sorry to hear about your accident, and hope you recover quickly.
As for your question, I think that nearly everyone wants to have a lasting
impact on the world in the way that is most salient to them. If your ideas
are important to you, then those are the form this would take.

As for ensuring that your content is preserved, if you send me a
zip/tar/rar/whatever of the content, I personally have enough webspace to
host (nearly) anything easily and ensure that it stays up at least within
the span of my life (and I'm young enough yet that this is of course
synonymous with 'forever' ;-)).

I don't know what you mean by 'publish', though; I imagine that that is a
more complicated affair after one is not around to pester and respond to the
publishers than before, unless you get it done in advance with an agreement
that it will only actually get released after you're gone.

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