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The Geocities Torrent (~1TB of awesomeness)

ascii.textfiles.com

41–50 of 89 posts

Re: The Geocities Torrent (~1TB of awesomeness)

#41
post #20
post #3

Wow. This site is amazing. Tons of gems: http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/

Was under construction the first web meme? All these people couldn't have arrived at the same metaphor individually (as obvious as it is).

Check out http://www.metafilter.com/85695/Please-Be-Patient-This-Page-... for a person's story of how he made the first animated GIFs.

Re: The Geocities Torrent (~1TB of awesomeness)

#43
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think the web is probably a better place with reocities than without it, slapping ads on this content feels a tad bit slimy to me. I'm curious to hear your take on the ethical and legal implications of it.

The ads are actually a boost for a HN'er. And let's suppose for a second that they were not (as they have not been in the past), reocities has cost a fairly large amount of money to date (instead of made money, as you suggest), not a single person that has asked me to remove the content has ever commented on the presence of the ads, and neither has anybody that has found their stuff again because I backed it up. On t…

As a former Geocities user, I am very pleased he has placed ads on the site. Hopefully the ad revenue will cover the hosting costs indefinitely.

If he makes a small profit, great! Hopefully that will encourage archivists of the future.

Re: The Geocities Torrent (~1TB of awesomeness)

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually scratch that this is simply like copying others blog posts on a massive scale. No, this is saving those blog posts from extinction.

I copied my content from Geocities to another provider and then on to my own site (eventually). I'm sure I'm not alone. Very little of that content is still live anywhere but there is a little I think. Also, why do you get to be the arbiter of whether others content can be allowed to disappear or not? If I own the copyright then it's within my rights to have all copies destroyed, for example, you secretly (as you've…

Not to toot my own horn here, but let me just give you one sample of the kind of email I get about this project, I'll leave you to judge the rest of them by this single one (it just happens to be the last one and more in this vein would be excessive and embarrassing):

--

I don't know who you are, but I just want say you are an angel. I thought I had laid the very first website I ever built on geocities to rest, and words cannot describe my utter and complete surprise to find it resurrected on reocities.

You say this project is a labor of love -- and that is exactly how I felt about my own website. It was, for at least 10 years of my life, the best expression of who I was, and it means so much to be able to relive that era again.

You are truly doing a public service by preserving early relics of Internet culture. I can only imagine that generations from now, when people are digging into the history of the web, they will be fascinated by what you've saved.

Thank you SO MUCH for doing what you do!

webmistress

reocities.com/avcorner2000

--

I'm not going to argue morality here with you any further, you apparently have a bee up your bonnet about this, but as they say, no good deed goes unpunished, there is no reason why this would be an exception.

greetings

Re: The Geocities Torrent (~1TB of awesomeness)

#45
post #15
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing that for the last 12 months, and the collection is significantly larger than that. http://www.reocities.com/

While I think the web is probably a better place with reocities than without it, slapping ads on this content feels a tad bit slimy to me. I'm curious to hear your take on the ethical and legal implications of it.

The AwesomenessReminder banner ads are perfect, though. Completely fit the style and the era.

Re: The Geocities Torrent (~1TB of awesomeness)

#46
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think the web is probably a better place with reocities than without it, slapping ads on this content feels a tad bit slimy to me. I'm curious to hear your take on the ethical and legal implications of it.

The AwesomenessReminder banner ads are perfect , though. Completely fit the style and the era.

Yes, I put them up there as a joke initially because Zachary came up with his animated gifs but then I thought oh, what the heck and left them up. I'm sure he's not making much money of them - if any - but it looked like a perfect fit.

His new site looks much better actually: http://www.awesomenessreminders.com/

Re: The Geocities Torrent (~1TB of awesomeness)

#48
post #7
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine at least somebody will download to a server and host them all there. Might grab a new 1TB drive into one of my servers and do it if I'm bored enough...

I've been doing that for the last 12 months, and the collection is significantly larger than that. http://www.reocities.com/

I'd love to know what sort of infrastructure you're running this on. I'm in a course for my Masters for library school that deals with similar sorts of problems in maintaining and preserving for the "long term" digital materials.

From your site it sounds like you wrote a script using wget to harvest the files and another to check them against versions that were still up. What do you do on the server end now to ensure that the files are still working correctly? Are you running periodic checksums on them or the like? Finally, are you looking for any help from an interested novice?

Re: The Geocities Torrent (~1TB of awesomeness)

#49
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, when did those disappear? That phrase immediately brought me back to ~1994. :)

Disappear? webring.com is still there. I dare you to enter "goth poetry" in its search window. Double dare, as a matter of fact.

Oh the teenage humanity! Curse you mhd! Curse you!

Re: The Geocities Torrent (~1TB of awesomeness)

#50

For anyone in Australia, it would be cheaper to pay them to put the data on a HDD, wrap it in bacon and hand deliver it - rather than download the torrent.

Really? I'm seeding it from Adelaide. There are options besides whatever Telstra shovels your way in most areas, you just have to poke around.

How would you like your bacon cooked?

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