Internet technology hosted by Berkman Center

About this Site

Monday, April 2, 2007

Background 

In 2003, when we transferred the RSS 2.0 specification from UserLand Software to Berkman Center, we created a weblog site called Technology at Harvard Law to host the spec. We already had a server set up to host weblogs for people at Harvard, so it made sense to also put the site on this server.

Over time, the blogging community grew, and along with it, the demands on the server, and eventually Berkman decided to move to new blog hosting software. So we had to come up with a way to transition the site. Since it was no longer functioning as a weblog, and we didn't want to have to face the same job years down the road, should the need to transition arise in the future, we decided to turn it into a static HTML site, served only by Apache. It's our belief that this is the most likely form to survive over the decades that the RSS 2.0 specification is likely to remain relevant.

So I volunteered to take a subset of the site, the part containing the spec itself and related documents, and convert it to static HTML pages. The result is the site you're looking at now. All the images and example files are in a single folder and a set of sub-folders. All links are relative, so the site can be relocated if need-be just by moving the folder; or mirrored at other locations.

We've created a zip archive for people to download, and since it's licensed under the Creative Commons, you are free to modify it, as long as you license it on the same terms as which it was licensed to you, and give proper attribution credit. See the terms at the bottom of each page.

Of course, archive.org has an archive of various versions of the original site.

Following are notes on the conversion.

3/30/07 DW 

Converting all fully-qualified urls to relative urls.

Wrote a post about the site conversion on Scripting News.

Added a site outline for the index page, to organize the content that is being converted.

3/29/07 DW 

Created an images sub-folder of the static site, copied the white-on-orange XML icon into the folder, linked to it from the site template. Moved the flowers image into the images folder, included it from the RSS spec page.

Created an examples sub-folder of the static site, copied the three example documents from the RSS spec into that folder and linked to them from the spec.

Copied favicon.ico from http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ into the top level of the static folder.