Blogs.harvard, wrapped: an ecosystem snapshot as the lights go out
¡Blogs.harvard is closing its doors for good!
Today is nominally the last day it will be editable, though it will stay up for archiving and export for another month. The WordPress dashboard lately has hadan expandable bar in the corner titled ‘Recent Updates’, but I’d never expanded it to see that it was local news about the platform, so this came as a surprise.
Checklist:
1) ping people who still need to migrate
2) draft final blog post, honoring the network
In the early days of blogging, Dave Winer was an energetic advocate of the form, as something important for writing and communication and not just another modern pastime. He set up the first version of Blogs@Harvard while he was a Berkman fellow (a Manila instance hosted by the Berkman Center, at blogs.law.harvard.edu), and started blogging there as well as at Scripting News. It moved to WordPress in 2007. The community revisited it in 2011 to reaffirm the value in keeping it online. (JP, as the head of the center, warmly summarized the project history to date at that point)
Over the next decade, new blogs were only created by Harvard affiliates. In 2014, technical maintenance of the blogs moved to the Harvard Library’s Office for Scholarly Communication, and the domain changed to blogs.harvard.edu. In 2018 its maintenance shifted to Harvard University Information Technology, and any old blogs run by authors who were not affiliates were closed [and taken offline, if they had not set up an archive]. This also affected a number of past affiliates who no longer had university or alum email addresses, including the pathbreaking info/law and j’s scratchpad, blog of the founding organizer of the Blogging Group.
Now the rest are being shut down. While bloggers still at Harvard can migrate to the existing sites.harvard.edu, with a bit of effort, they are not being migrated by default, and most have not migrated. Those without new posts in the past year were not notified of the change. This also affects people like Doc Searls, a long-time pillar of free software and the open web who we’ve been lucky to have in the local eddy, whose active projects live on nearby.
There are plans for a full archive to be preserved; let’s make it one befitting this decentralized community, which has hosted many students and practitioners of digital creation and archiving. Going through the archiving process myself reminds me of the [extraordinary, wonderful] service of the Wayback Machine, which may also let us restore former blogs currently hidden behind its veil.
Checklist:
3) Salvage old drafts
4) Make a proper export
It is a curious sensation to revisit my old tempo of posting by seeing the proportionate tempo of unpublished drafts; some quite good and close to completion, but written in a week or month when many other works were going out. These days I would publish a good three-section post without hesitation. Most drafts removed or published; new “unfinished draft” category added.
I am also reminded that fully half of the links from over 5 years ago are no longer online; other websites having a much shorter time-to-linkrot than this blog family. Again, Wayback is not only a default salvation but one of the only options; if it disappeared, readers, researchers, and historians would be entirely out of luck (short of bring up one of the Wayback mirrors). If you are in a position to host a full mirror (currently around 100PB), please get in touch with the archiveteam or the Internet Archive.
Exports should be easy, though mine is not small. Preserving the directory structure on import requires a target style that uses the same schema for dated posts. Alternately, I could scrape the entire site into a .wacz file and restore its public appearance exactly as it stands today, then move to a different format for a future blog. I’d like something more collaborative by nature; easy to have a cohort working together. I have hopes that Tana could be turned towards this end, as shared writing is naturally a more social activity than just linking to one another’s blogs (and even here some of the best outlier blogs here have been multi-author, during times when many were active together)
https://blogs.harvard.edu/project-info/
“‘I participate in contact origami’, The Book”, The Movie
Footprints in a self-similar river. The occasional passing act of will that remains and is amplified downstream, so that at some future moment, perhaps fording at another spot altogether, you discover a print announcing to you alone that you have been there before.
A decade ago, I once spent too long creating a stylesheet for a tiny “how-to” template: the numbers in boxes laying out a three-step process, whether to switch fonts, bold, padding, background and border colors. Making the css just right to work on screens of all sizes.
It looked something like this. >>
In fact, almost exactly like that. Some things worked, some didn’t. I tried to add padding to the left of the roman numerals, tried to remove the pixel of whitespace above the bordered boxes, without success. Should the roman numerals be left-aligned but the boxed text centered? Since then, scores of similar templates have copied and remixed it, changing text and context but not style. The color palette I settled on, almost content with it, shows up on hundreds of pages. It would now take a script and many hours to find and tweak each instance of the design.
I run across one myself every few months, and experience river-shock: the sense of seeing something simple you did once that has a quiet, pervasive mark that cannot be undone. This is quite different from the sense of pride or dismay that comes from seeing the expected result of a major endeavor: a book in someone’s hands, a clinic building in use or in disrepair, a student now teaching others.
Another memory: One week I set about compiling a collection for a museum, a complete series of parts, diagrams and XO laptops: a few boxes full. I had sent background context by mail, but at the last minute took a fine-tipped sharpie and attached clarifying notes to post-its on each cluster.
Years later, visiting the museum with a friend, I ran across the display as part of a history of computing; the electronics beautifully preserved as I had hoped, as I saw with pride. And – river shock – a handful of my post-its, with small diagrams and 8pt-font notes to the curator, exactly where I had placed them. Anyone with access to the materials could have chosen one of each and put them in a box; my handwriting made it seem like my own workdesk, enclosed in perspex and on display.
On occasion a visitor will find one of the historical texts I’ve preserved against linkrot and plagiarism, like the acquiantance checking up on the man trapped in Charles de Gaulle airport, or a friend running across their favorite college essay or spellpoem, and I have a shadow of that frisson. A passing fancy, created to be found anonymously by others, appearing at least once more in the endless river of daily life.
Aksyonov predicts Crimean takeover in ’79 novel
Vassily Aksyonov wrote The Island of Crimea in 1979 – about an imagined future. It looks surprisingly like the present.
Kudos to Michael Idov at the New Yorker for writing about it beautifully, with all of its spooky accuracy.
(Night Wolves! Aksyonov again!)
Dimple joust as sport: the perfect combination of skill and reflex
Dimple jousting is the purest form of duel. Everyone can play on equal footing, the winner is obvious, and there is no chance involved.
Wikipedia The Movie: the maddest thing I’ve read in some time
Wikipedia The Movie, a wiki-amusement started by Mark Pellegrini during the Chrome Age of Wikipedia, is hard to describe, and not exactly what you might expect. It is a surreal cataclysm of in-jokes pretzled together into a tilable shape. Its pieces have been polished by those who appreciate it: editors with a sense of humor, reflecting on a larger community whose relationship with humor is more nuanced. In short Dalí-scented scenes, and the language of cafeteria gossip, it captures something about the projects in a way that is honest to the madness of humanity. Enough to make any committed editor wince/smile. It makes me wonder what a similarly frank slice of subtext would look like for other large-scale projects.
While I remember the original being written – not called ‘Episode 1’ at the time – I only discovered last year that it had been turned into a franchise, slowly unfolding year after year. And I can’t complain that I was cast as my favorite Shakespearean fragranceur.
And then there is the musical version. For you who have shared the private hallucinations of those who breathe too deep of lemony Huggle vapour, give over a few minutes of your day to a stroll down memory’s phantasmagoria:
That curious creature, the technicolor starling, illuminated
My power animal: Hildebrandt’s starling. Similar to some butterflies, these starlings are colored by the microscopic structure of its feathers, not pigment.
Putting peacocks (and the stray chalybaeus) to shame for 2,000,000 years.
HT: Gaia. via Wikimedia Commons. (this one is from Tanzania)
Cambridge doggerel in celebration of her glorious sunsets
140 characters, just like mom’s.
The sunset was pretty
in Cambridge. The ember
of Sun cast the city
in hues to remember.
When I tried to draw Rindge
and Latin, ’twas orange.
Desert canticles wrestle susurrantly, lithe behind quiet eyes
Sitting down today to write my first non-work letter in a few weeks. I’ve been enjoying poetry lately; here’s some Simon:
A man walks down the street
Dusty street in a strange world
Maybe it’s the Third World
Maybe it’s his first time around
He doesn’t speak the language
He holds no currency
He is a foreign man
He is surrounded by the sound
The sound
Cattle in the marketplace
Scatterlings and orphanages
He looks around, around
He sees angels in the architecture
Spinning in infinity
He says Amen and Hallelujah!
A Horrific Day in Boston – Death and Mayhem at the Marathon
Today was a horrifying day for Boston – our annual celebration of pride, unity, and Spring put on hold for bombs and ambulances. My thoughts are with those who have been injured or killed.
We have these strange interplays of increased safety and increased risk at large public events – it seems to me there is more we could do to shift the equilibrium towards safety in numbers. Even in the face of anonymous attacks from a distance.
But today we mourn.
Genius And The Soil / Inspired By Aaron: Thoughts From me, mako, jwyg
From the latest issue of the UK magazine red pepper. With photos by Sage Ross from a memorable Boston Wikipedia meetup in 2009. Click on the pages for higher resolution:
Web <30 – the Future of the Web is Intertextual
From a recent discussion about Web 3.0 and the far future, on the AIR-L list:
In fact, the Web is currently developing Web <30, to be rolled out
with Chrome 25, Firefox 20, Opera 15, and IE 10 later this winter.
If you are interested in cutting-edge research and convolving
observation with participation, you can take part in the design of Web
<30 yourself. It is being developed through a massively
multistakeholder open online crowd-refined platform generation
(MMOOCRPG) design.
Building on the exponential success of past
efforts, the development mailing list includes a periodic
distributed auto-immolating critique of its own work, where the future
web is continuously redefined as its own dual.
One man’s salvation from persistent madness to reasoned satirist
96 days of altered consciousness and recovering from a psychotic break. Told with humor and self-awareness, in an epic 18-part tale.
Let’s say that every time I see a yellow car, you actually see what I would call a green dragon, and we’ve just adapted to different driving styles… Now let’s assume we both see an object descended from the Model-T, and not the offspring of a bat fucking an iguana in a wood stove.* Except now I’m secretly attaching the symbol of car to dragon.
* I say natural selection demands that if you did this enough times, something would survive, and I bet that something would be a dragon. If there are any crazy people reading this right now, you have your mission.
Mystery Hunting, 2013: Pulling off an epic Coin Heist
Mystery Hunt 2013 pitted teams against Enigma Valley to rescue the Hunt coins from a vault.
As usual, it was full of some of the best puzzle ideas in the world. (more…)
Westboro Baptists face off with Anonymous at Aaron’s service
Yesterday, the Westboro Baptist Church (a cultlike single-family church that gets publicity for its extreme religious views by picketing high-profile funerals – such as those of soldiers returning from fighting overseas – with the most offensive chants they can muster) declared they would attend and picket Aaron’s funeral tomorrow. (via Salon) I suppose that is a sign that they expected it will generate publicity.
Anonymous, which has opposed WBC antics in the past, launched Operation Angel in response: to minimize the impact of such picketing, and help avoid the hounding of people like Aaron in the future.
In Remembrance of Aaron (1986-2013)
Please send your photos, stories, and quotes to his memorial website:
Remember Aaron Swartz | Official family statement about his death
There will be a funeral on Tuesday in Chicago. Memorials in a few cities over the next two weeks: including Boston, New York, DC and SF.
Essays:
Danny: He was funny
“Update: We talked. Ada cried, then we hugged, then Ada suggested we have a goodbye party, with ice-cream and sprinkles and a movie, and make a board where we could pin all our memories. We laughed at how funny he was. Aaron taught her so well.”
Tim Berners-Lee: “Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder…”
James Grimmelmann: Aaron Swartz, Was 26.
Cory Doctorow: RIP Aaron Swartz.
“Uncompromising, Reckless and Delightful”
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/farewell-aaron-swartz
Quinn Norton: “My Aaron Swartz, whom I loved.”
“Make the world that wouldn’t have killed him, please.”
Larry Lessig: on Aaron and the prosecutor as bully.
“He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius.
A soul, a conscience, the source of a question
I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think?”
Brewster Kahle: Aaron Swartz, Hero of the Open World, Dies
Erik Moeller and Tilman Bayer: Remembering Aaron Swartz
JSTOR: heartfelt condolences honoring Aaron’s memory.
Doc Searls: Losing Aaron
Chris Hayes, MSNBC: The Brilliant Mind and Righteous Heart of Aaron Swartz will be missed.
Media:
New York Times (front page).
The Guardian (front page + 4 more articles)
WaPo’s Tim Lee: “Aaron Swartz, American Hero”
Hacker News front page today:
