Archiving content from GeoCities websites
Jun 22 2009 12:30
Thread for coordinating the copying of content from various geocities sites, due to be closed down later this year, to the libcom library.
to be posted to libcom, no one currently doing, and not copied elsewhere:
-
To be posted to libcom, but already copied elsewhere so lower priority:
- Collective Action Notes - archived already
- John Gray For Communism - to be archived soon
- http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/8195/ - subversion - already on AF North
posting to libcom currently underway:
-
completed
- practical history - done by captain soap
- no war but the class war - done by captain soap
- undercurrent
- antagonism - done by captain soap
- red and black notes - done by Jack
-http://www.geocities.com/insurrection_raven/en_texts/index.html - done by dead-end
- wage slave x
Missed
-- http://www.geocities.com/aggoa2000/index13.html - oh dear, well was any of the stuff here in the good to anyone know?
Jun 22 2009 15:58
#2
I suggest this be 'stickied' until geocities is confirmed history.
Jun 23 2009 16:02
#3
i have made an archive of collective action notes, available here.
for anyone trying to automatically download material from geocities with a web crawler, be forewarned that geocities has some pretty nasty code in place to shut down sites if it thinks someone is doing a recursive crawl - you need to set really high intervals of time between document requests, ideally randomized, all of which linux tools like wget will do, but it might take multiple tries and a bit of frustration.
Jun 24 2009 00:30
#4
Red and Black Notes is another site that will need to be copied.
All the Undercurrent stuff (assuming there is no more online than the three issues here) is already in libcom's library. I might start copying the rest of the Antagonism site across, as it's not particularly huge and won't seem overwhelming.
I will just copy and paste things as library entries rather than all into one .csv, as that way I will be able to preview whether I've fucked up the formatting.
One question - Antagonism has a few things translated into Turkish, Russian and Greek; John Gray has lots of stuff in French, Italian, German etc. Do we want to copy this across as well, or just stick with Englsih for the moment? Obviously we'll need speakers of those languages to write the intro/summaries, and with some of the Antagonism stuff, even to identify what the article actually is. I can do this for German but nothing else. For the moment I'll stick with copying English stuff, anyway.
Jun 24 2009 02:35
#5
Also some stuff on No War But The Class War that may be worth copying, although most of it is reproduced either here, or on the sites listed above.
Jun 24 2009 09:34
#6
Thanks very much for your help.
On foreign language stuff, we do have a very limited amount of foreign language content on our site, but we decided in general to just focus on English stuff.
However, if something was important, and going to be lost from the Internet, it could be put in the library and just tagged with two tags, one giving the name of the language it's in in English, and one of the language in its own language.
I.e. Polish, Polska
Foreign language stuff wouldn't really need an intro necessarily, because we don't really focus on organising that content well.
Jun 24 2009 09:51
#7
captain soap wrote:
Antagonism has a few things translated into Turkish, Russian and Greek; John Gray has lots of stuff in French, Italian, German etc. Do we want to copy this across as well, or just stick with Englsih for the moment?
russian sector is stored on revolt.anho.org
Jun 24 2009 10:47
#8
johm - nice work on the crawling, I think that's the best bet to ensure there's at least one copy of everything before they're all taken down.
Jun 24 2009 14:02
#9
The John Gray site is in the process of moving itself and might even get around to adding some new content. Mirroring texts is an excellent idea but you might want to start with those sites which are truly dead rather than just smelling funny. (Note that some sites which have already moved like Class Against Class haven't taken all the old content with them).
Collective Action Notes is still active as far as I can see - I don't know what it's relocation plans are but with this and any other active sites it would be a good idea to find out and put a link back to the relocated pages on your mirror. (Aside from anything else one consequence of geocities closing is that a fair bit of communist and anarchist stuff will disappear from the first pages of google seaches).
As important as archiving texts is archiving old links. Many sites and texts are already archived in the Internet Archive (including some that are no longer up in reality). Wthout the original page links it's not easy to find them there.
Jun 24 2009 16:17
#10
http://www.geocities.com/ncajsa/ I know Little Brother on here was active in that, he might have some other geocities sites that need archiving if you pm him.
Jun 24 2009 23:42
#11
Jun 25 2009 03:12
#12
Dead End wrote:
commie zero zero
Workers Councils And Autonmous Workers Struggles
Wage Slave X's Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Homepage
Subversion
Red & Black Notes
Practical History
for communism
The first two just contain links to stuff on John Gray, CAN etc. I think the person who does 'Wage Slave X' posts here; no idea if they have plans to relocate the site, maybe they can post if they want it copied?
I think the Subversion archive has already been reproduced both here and on af-north.org. Practical History probably has a few things worth copying, though.
Jun 25 2009 08:49
#13
I did copy some of the stuff off practical history couple of years ago, but I think I left a fair bit as well.
Jun 29 2009 19:57
#14
Just added On the Content of Socialism, Part One.
From Class Against Class
Libcom had parts two and three but not one.
Jun 29 2009 20:12
#15
Great, thank you!
Jul 2 2009 12:27
#16
necessary bump
Jul 2 2009 15:31
#17
I'm copying the text over of Italy, living with an earthquake from class against class, but is taking a while to formatting, fix the spelling mistakes, etc
Jul 2 2009 16:17
#18
Just a note of thanks here again to captain soap for all this work - all the formatting and tagging everything is just spot-on, really excellent stuff, cheers.
Let us know when you're next in London and we will get you drinks!
Jul 3 2009 01:27
#19
Not a problem.
Jul 4 2009 10:39
#20
So I'm a bit unclear, sorry - can we have
(1) geocities sites that have been successfully saved [and if other than Libcom],
(2) sites that are partly saved, but still have parts in need of saving, and
(3) sites that noone that we know of has done anything about saving yet and someone should get on it?
It's just a way to try to be sure that it all gets done and we don't trip over each other, letting some rare stuff fall through the cracks. Isuppose it's like a checklist or scorecard, sorta, or I guess a glorified Libcom Geocities project 'to do' list, just to keep track?
It justs seems that the effort seems kind of scattered right now, (though great efforts by some are to be cheered 
*Thank you,comrades*
What do you think?
Jul 11 2009 18:51
#21
I'm not too aware of what is more rare than other stuff, but maybe if people continously updated their post, adding what they've added to libcom, so we dont post the same stuff or spend time on formatting stuff thats already been done?
i dont dunno, an idea.
So far from me:
-The Communist Tendency in History from Practical History
-THE SHOW IS OVER! by Point Blank! from Subversion
-The Capitalist State: Illusion and Critique by Werner Bonefeld from Insurrection Raven
By the way, if the stuff I'm contributing is not formatted correctly or could be done better, let me know. Adding things to a non-blog site is new to me and I'm just trying to help where I can.
Jul 5 2009 02:01
#22
Ok, I've copied about 2/3 of the stuff from Antagonism, and will probably move onto Red and Black Notes after that. John Gray, Collective Action Notes and Class Against Class are probably the most important ones to save, but given they've either already been backed up or are going to be, this is no longer as crucial.
As far as double-posting goes, just put the name of the text into google along with "site:libcom.org" (don't need the quotes) and it should bring up any duplicates. Sometimes there are slight variations in the titles though, so for existing authors it's probably worth cross-checking with the tag for that author.
Speaking of duplicates, I've noticed these so far, and I'm sure others will emerge along the way:
http://libcom.org/library/politics-herman-gorter-anton-pannekoek
http://libcom.org/library/the-politics-of-gorter-pannekoek
http://libcom.org/library/content-socialism-1-socialisme-ou-barbarie
http://libcom.org/library/content-socialism-socialisme-ou-barbarie
Also, I wasn't sure whether to copy the copy of Pannekoek's 'Party and Class' from the Antagonism site. As far as I can tell, it is the same text as 'Party and Working Class' in the library here, but a different translation. The Antagonism one reads better, IMO.
Jul 5 2009 07:39
#23
arminius wrote:
I suggest this be 'stickied' until geocities is confirmed history.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/geocities/close/
It's closing in October and it looks like everything will be deleted if it isn't saved or preserved.
Jul 5 2009 08:17
#24
captain soap wrote:
Ok, I've copied about 2/3 of the stuff from Antagonism, and will probably move onto Red and Black Notes after that. John Gray, Collective Action Notes and Class Against Class are probably the most important ones to save, but given they've either already been backed up or are going to be, this is no longer as crucial.
Class Against Class is already moved to a new Joomla site, and the guy who runs it hates libcom so much he won't even link to the current Aufheben site because it's on here, so we might not get a good response to backed up Class Against Class stuff...
Jul 5 2009 10:12
#25
Jack, it's fine to copy stuff from class against class, as long as there is a crediting link.
I'm going to go through this thread to try to sort out what needs to be copied, what has been, etc and then added into the original post for reference.
Dead end, you're doing a great job submitting and formatting everything, thanks.
Jul 5 2009 10:17
#26
Okay, cool
captain soap - I'll do Red and Black notes if you wanted to do a different one after Antagonism?
Jul 5 2009 10:25
#27
Right, I've made this thread a sticky, and updated the original post to include information of what sites are being copied, when and by whom.
Jack and other admins, if you could help keep that updated that would be great.
Jul 5 2009 10:44
#28
Steven. / anyone else - I've started Red and Black Notes, but before I do loads can someone check I'm doing the formatting right so I don't have to go back and fix them all!
http://libcom.org/library/different-sort-democracy-martin-glaberman
http://libcom.org/library/workers-culture-clr-james
http://libcom.org/library/some-thoughts-re-organization-revolutionary-left
Also, is there a different tag we use for "the left"?
Jul 5 2009 10:50
#29
I think the formatting you use is fine, but just to nitpick, can you not capitalise all the key words in the title? Just the first one and any relevant ones after (i.e. place/people names etc).
As for tagging, I think we've got Leninism/Trotskyism/Maoism tags that you could use instead of 'the left'.
Jul 5 2009 10:58
#30
Also for anything to do with state socialism we have the tag "state socialism", as well as the ones Ed mentions. Nice one Jack!
Okay well there's a couple of main things to sort out here, what sites need their stuff archived, and who can do it.
Here's some mentioned on a previous thread. Please post up any more that you can think of, and also please post if you are willing to help. If there's a particular site you want to take responsibility for please say so also.
In terms of help formatting content, there's some information here:
http://libcom.org/notes/content-guidelines
Hopefully that will tell you most of what you need to know, but anything else please feel free to ask here.
Here are sites mentioned so far:
- Collective Action Notes
- John Gray For Communism
- Antagonism
- Undercurrent