The next site I'm bringing back, hopefully, is conventionbloggers.com. 

It started as a blog, then turned into a river of news aggregator. First for the DNC, then the RNC. It was also used to accumulate posts for a blogging conference at Harvard in 2005.  

I have been able to get the blog back on line. It is a Manila site. For a long-term archive I'm probably going to have to figure out how to statically render it.  

I'll continue posting notes here as the work continues. Sorry if you find this boring or off-topic, but one of the things I wish I had from back then is a similar blog post narrating the work I did. It would help me find all the bits and pieces that make up this site.  

Here's an archive.org snapshot of the main site taken in 2006. 

And then I found all the static content! 

First, I thought I had all the stuff on a local hard disk. Turns out I did. I searched for a bit of text that was on one of the archive pages of the "cred" site. It found it, in about a hundred files. So I just moved my cursor over each of the files and looked at the file paths. One of them looked right. Went to the folder, a backup of all the static files on an ancient server called matrixmonster. There was all the static content I had been looking for, backed up in 2008. Boom! 

Now I'm going to make some coffee and think about how I want to transition this content to a more future-safe location and address. 

1. I'm going to store all the static content on S3, in a bucket named safe.scripting.com. I'm using scripting.com based on the principle of getting the names to coalesce, so over time there will be fewer fees to pay, and less to maintain. More of it will "just work." 

2. Because it's a website, with index files, we have to use a different name to access the content over the web. The long name will be a little inconvenient, even though it works. I've created a CNAME that's a little easier to manage and made S3 jump through the ridiculously designed hoops it has to jump through.  

3. Because I want to be able to use this bucket to future-safe other content, I'm going to create a folder within it called conventionbloggers and copy all the content I've found in my backup into that folder. 

After getting everything uploaded, which takes a long time on my ridiculously slow Time-Warner cable connection (it's good at downloading, terrible at uploading) I realized that there are a lot of hard-coded URLs in these files that point at the old domains. A redirect will fix them, but not long-term after I let the conventionbloggers.com domain lapse.  

To get all the redirections sorted out, first I need to redirect the domains to their paths. Once I have all those done, I can apply those redirections to the source text, and then re-upload later today or tonight.