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

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Nomad of Norad -- David C Hall <
nomad-conlang@...> wrote:

> Would that rsync be done from the host-server side or from the LCS side? I
> had envisioned this as something an LCS user would select from a menu at the
> LCS site, fill in a field pointing to the page or pages at his site that he
> wanted preserved/mirrored, and set an interval for it to do this (say, once
> a week, once a month, etc, depending on how active he thinks his site is)...
>
Preferably from the host-server side, as a push. Pull is simply less
reliable IRL, IMHE. Plus you would still have dependencies on the host
server (SSH keys, eg).

Plus, there isn't really an "LCS server" as such. We have our own account,
and all subdomains also have their own (separated) accounts - with separate
logins, quotas, directory structure, possibly even on different physical
machines. Those accounts are all tied together pretty minimally, through the
billing & account maintenance system.

Of course, if you have a solution that could be practical and not the huge
mess that I'm envisioning when I think of pull-based backup of heterogenous
sources, do speak up...


> True, but of course we DO want something that a Windoze user can configure
> really easily, from a menu pane or something, rather than something he has
> to dig down under the hood and configure by editing a text file or issuing
> switches from a command-line interface or something...
>
Indeed. Google for it - there have to be Windows-compatible remote backup
over SCP programs.

Certainly many of the better website creation programs have this; e.g.
Aptana, Dreamweaver (I think?), ...


> Making it open-source just means it can be ported easily (or not-so-easily,
> depending on what authoring system or programming language its written in).
>  I.e. you could have a Windoze version, a BeOS version (if someone was
> willing), an AmigaOS version, and so on....
>
Ha. :-P

's all good in theory, but again in practice, this is 100% a matter of
uptake, both by a couple programmers to maintain it and a community to use
it.

This however is way out of scope; backup programs are a relatively
mainstream thing, and it'd make more sense to use an existing solution.


> True, but what I had envisioned was something that the end-user could set
> from the LCS website, check or uncheck boxes in his configurization screen
> on-site.
>
Not really possible unless we were to have a centralized content system that
everyone uses (e.g. MediaWiki could do this). We're not going to dictate
what people put on their own websites, and I've already spoken about my
personal views against the splintering of wikis et al already; I'd not
contribute to that by creating yet another.

If however FrathWiki / Langmaker merged, e.g., and got major uptake, one
could build in such a content-protection feature to them. "Major" here means
that people would be using them to publish their conlanging material at
least as much as they would use their own website.

As for having something like this for any arbitrary content? No existing
solution that I know of, and creating one would be a very major undertaking
that is not justifiably within the scope of the LCS.


> F'rex, in my own conworld, there is a deep secret that right now, if I
> placed it up on the site, would constitute a Major Spoiler, but it is
> something intended to be revealed later on into the planned story-arc.
>
You could do something like this using one of the systems that online
novelists / comic artists use to pre-publish work, so that it automatically
gets released on a set date.

Again though this is something that you'd do on your own site...


Tto be blunt, we don't have the resources to subcontract, do any significant
server maintenance, babysit mirrors, manage content, etc. We can provide
*access to* a webhost, but not that level of services.

Of course, if any Unix geeks in the community want to volunteer their
services for this, please speak up. ;-) And I do believe (as previously
stated on my own behalf) that a centralized conlang documentation /
elaboration / work / collaboration site would be a Good Thing, though it
would require cooperation from existing siteops and users to attain the
necessary critical mass.

- Sai