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

Sai Emrys wrote:
> 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.)
What about mirroring of an existing site onto the LCS site?  At that,
I've noticed that some wikis contain direct copies of articles from
wikipedia proper, which apparently they update automatically as that
article changes at wikipedia.  It might also be worth creating, as well,
a Wayback sort of thing, independent of archive.org, as a hedge in case
archive.org (God forbid!) ever goes byebye,

> 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.
I suppose somewhere along the line it'd be useful to develop some kind
of open-source dictionary-builder app, something that would do for
dictionaries and language-guides what wikipedia has done for
encyclopedia media, and make/offer it as the standardised program at LCS.

>
> 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.
Another thing just crossed my mind:  There have been radio ads lately
for a program that automatically duplicates the contents of your
computer onto a personally-accessible site online, so you can restore
data after an HDD crash or something.  It occurs to me that LCS could
provide a personally-accessible mirror of the contents of a user's
selected local folders, maybe even something that provides so many
levels deep of a backup, so you could go back to a folder corresponding
to a week ago, that is a separate image than that which was changed
yesterday, and allowing the user to set an arbitrary number of back
copies (i.e. 7 folder-copies back) and dumping the oldest copy/ies as
the newest copy comes in.  Perhaps maintaining it, or the oldest ones,
as a zip file or set of zip files.

We could provide some sort of open-source mirror-the-folder(s) program
that is provided with the LCS membership, with the included benefit that
  if you die, you can specify (at your discretion) that those folders
and zips be opened to the public for perusal or otherwise be preserved
for posterity.

The idea being here that the folder you keep your works-in-progress in,
where your conlang scratchpad files are, and so on, would be preserved
so that you, and/or future generations, can see the bits and pieces of
your language as it developed, and/or the bits and pieces that didn't
quite make it to the dictionary-site yet... so that that stuff won't die
when you do.

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