Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
All Change at HOL?
When I started this site just over nine years ago, I didn't have a clue about what I was doing nor how the site would grow. I found the platform we still use today by accident and back in the heady emerging social media days of 2007 and 2008 they were great. The platform was constantly evolving and if I ever had any problems they were incredibly responsive.
However, the exciting (excitable?) social media buzz of those days has settled down to a background hum. Many tech companies went to the wall. Our platform hosts have survived, but were bought by a company which if it were a parent would long ago have been taken to court for severe neglect. This second-rate parent has just sold the platform on. Some accounts suggest that the new owner may be less parent and more modern-day slaver.
Worldwide, users of this platform are up in arms that our monthly fees are being doubled, but perhaps more than that, people are concerned about the viability of the platform in the medium term. So it seems like it's time to start contemplating some other futures.
If the platform closes down, not only would HoL face oblivion, but almost a decade of local community conversation will be lost for good. (This would be just one small part of what's being talked about as potentially the 'forgotten century' as all sorts of digitally stored archives disappear forever). That would be a shame for us now as well as for those who come after us.
To ensure our survival and the preservation of the rich tapestry in our archive, we may need to find a new home. As a first step I've reached out to the other Haringey sites that patterned themselves on HoL and used the same platform.
But, whether we do it alone or work with other sites, any move would mean specifying a new platform and then finding someone to make it for us. So two questions from me at this point:
1. In terms of the features we have and the ways things look, what would you like to change and what stay the same?
2. Can anyone help out on the technical side? As you can imagine the site is not blessed with huge wealth! (But we have won multiple awards and are well known in communities around the world....and...and....I guess any solution you make for us can be applied to a huge number of other people currently using our platform and also looking for a new home).
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Harringay 4eva on
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What really strikes me about your original post Hugh is that a) HOL is a huge asset to the local community b) the potential task you describe is potentially massive (if you take into account archiving, researching & testing a new site, fixing any teething problems/maintenance etc). The People's Health Trust are currently open for funding applications from Haringey (yes, the borough!) residents to their Active Communities programme & this feels like it might be potential project to bid for funding support for. You may need to submit the bid through an existing constituted community group but I think it would be a pretty painless process & would ensure that there's some time & funds budgeted for updating & maintaining HOL.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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Thanks I'll take a look at that. You're right about the daunting amount of work that would be involved in the transfer.
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Thank you all for these very helpful replies. It seems like there's a bewildering choice of platforms and what sounds like some pretty heavy lifting to be done both for the transfer and the build. I've got into the Ning archiver finally and discovered two things. Firstly, it's painfully slow and secondly it's limited. It limits the size of archive you can make to the last 10,000 items within any category. That would mean only 10,000 forum items out of 30,000 - but it may be we could lose old for sale, lost pets etc and then do a manual trawl on the rest to trim it down to size - that's assuming I don't grow old and fade away whilst the archive is happening.
I'm attracted to Abi's idea of bidding for some funding as my guess is that it's going to be tough to get the support I need through volunteers alone.
So, perhaps a plan of action is:
1. See if I can get some funding - and I'd need some help framing the cost side of this.
2. Meet with some local tech geniuses to share my thoughts on some kind of spec and work through the options.
3. In the meantime, keep plugging away on that archiving!
There's also been another twist in the ownership story. Earlier today, this appeared on the website of Ning's current (pre-change) owners:
We’re happy to report that we have a bit more information we can now share publicly with you. While Cyndx LLC took over Ning operations last week, they were ultimately outbid by another company, which has entered into an agreement with Mode Media to acquire Ning. We can’t yet share the name of this company with you but will make an official announcement tomorrow with more information.
That's really reassuring then!
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Permalink Reply by JoeW on
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My money's on Microsoft!
Regarding the archive it might be possible to do it in batches - archive the last 10K, then delete the last 10K, then repeat. As my old software development manager used to say, "sounds easy if you say it fast!"
(He also said transferring data from A to B was always the hardest part of any development project...)
Getting some funding sounds like a good idea, then use it to pay someone who has done this kind of thing before, at least to plan and lead the project.
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
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An archiving approach you might consider if you haven't already is to 'scrape' the site:
Free software like HTTrack can 'mirror' the entire site (or just a section to try it out). Coders can also adapt existing 'scrapers'. I reckon the entire existing site can be captured this way - ning is a very simple, mostly an HTML generator - all the existing content is practically static.
If you go for a toolkit, maybe you can spread the tech net wider to leverage the 'civic tech' movement?
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Hmm, I'm trying to follow the instructions at http://forum.httrack.com/readmsg/15816/15608/index.html. I get as far as ./configure in terminal then get "-bash: ./configure: No such file or directory". I'm clearly out of my depth.
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So, I just tried the instructions at http://macappstore.org/httrack/ and that seemed to work.
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Other website copiers are available :)
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HTTrack will give you the rendered HTML rather than the raw content.
This is not going to be fun to re-ingest.
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Don't think there's much difference between the internal ning db and the HTTrack linked-list html representation of those db records, so it could be as straightforward as any other import mechanism.
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There will be quite a lot of difference between them as one will be raw content and the other will be rendered through a templating engine.
If that is your view of how modern CMS platforms work then that explains your obsession with WordPress and following the heard rather then developing the right solution to the task in hand.
@Hugh, sorry if you feel that his falls foul of the kicking the ball side of the site. I feel that bad advice based upon little knowledge of the subject matter is far worse however.
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Hey, no probs, I know your intent is to give the best advice you can.
My point is that there's not much difference between the ning db records and the rendered html - easy to strip.
My view of how CMS's work is based on reading the source. My relational database experience predates Codd. As you can imagine, I've seen a whole range of CMS's come and go on various platforms and sizes of kit, from IBM downwards.
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