Thursday August 8, 2019; 9:09 AM EDT
Today comes news that Linux Journal is shutting down. They say they'll be able to keep the archive online for a couple of weeks.#- Now here's an opportunity to do the wind-down the right way. Linux Journal isn't the ordinary publication that lets the domain registration lapse and stops paying the storage bills for the archive. And then next year it's a porn site or a phishing destination. I'm assuming the last people at Linux Journal care about the accumulated know-how and history at the site. And this event raises the question of how to do such a wind-down best. #
- Ideally, the archive remains online and accessible at linuxjournal.com for the foreseeable future so all pointers into the site continue to work. This might not cost a lot of money especially if the site is largely static content. So the first question is this -- is it? And if so, how much is there? With that data we can estimate what the annual cost will be and then set about raising the money. I would be happy to kick in some myself. #
- If not, then perhaps we can find a way to enumerate the URLs and then set up a service that redirects them to the archive.org version of the content? #
- Or perhaps we could write a scraper that visits the pages, downloads a snapshot and stores them in static files. #
- According to the site we have a couple of weeks to do the research and moving. #