With Varying Frequency – Amateur Radio Ponderings

You are thinking about a new antenna market, and you remember a couple weeks ago a fellow radio amateur, XYC123Z had written a wonderful blog post about using this antenna.  

So you check his blog – and not only is the post not there, but the entire blog you had once read is gone!

Guess it is off to look for other information….

So what does a Blog Reader do to help keep the information from Blogs that is important available to them on the long run?

Some suggestions:

Print It – Many people feel unless it it is printed on paper and part of their station library that information is only temporary.  They print out articles that interest them and create a manual filing system to keep these copies.

Burn It – A variation of Print It where the reader burns copy to storage media, whether burning to CD-ROM, CD-RW, Flash Drive or other storage media.  

Take a Feed – If the blog you are interested in is consistently one you would like to have a local copy for your own reference, consider subscribing to the Blog by RSS feed.  This doesn’t work all that well if the blog or your feed reader have a post size limit for content carried in the RSS feed.

Search Web Archives – Archive.org, Google’s caches – You might find a copy in one of the on-line archives, but so often The Wayback Machine and to Google’s Caches come up dry, perhaps XYC123Z had a “No Robots” policy (whether he knew it or not) and the blog was never archived, or it simply didn’t rate high enough on the search engines to be crawled for archive.

An Archive of One’s Own – There are software packages out there that through your browser will crawl a website and pull a copy.  Many browsers can also locally save a copy of webpage (in the case of Safari, which I am using as I write this post, the Command-S function will locally archive a page.)

Unconventional/Aggregator Archives – One peculiar feature of the Blogosphere is the presence of Aggregator or Pirate Re-Posting Blogs.  These are blogs who copy from primary blogs, almost never having original posts.  Occasionally you can find  a mirrored copy of an otherwise missing Blog or Blog Post on one of these Unconventional Archives.  Don’t forget to look for foreign language versions as well.

Hopefully these ideas will start a reader down the path to create an archive of material important to them.

73

Steve
K9ZW

Anti-Strategies?  What is an Anti-Strategy?

Many bloggers consider their posts commentaries and “asides” to the real communication in the Amateur Radio world.  

They have a point – Jeff KE9V has pointed out in his comments to this series how the timeliness that give a blog post vitality quickly fades.  

The readership interested in your blog post that you just worked some big DXpedidtion an hour ago may be huge at the time of posting, and almost nonexistent five weeks, much less five years, later.

Out of this idea some bloggers have a Anti-Strategies for backing up their blogs, including:

Laize Faire – or  an “I’m easy with what will be, will be”  approach to blog backup is when a blogger simply lets what will happen, happen.  If the blog goes off line, ok.  If when it does they can gets some chunks back from various sources, cool.  They simply “let it happen, as it happens.”

Burn the Fields – Is an idea some bloggers adopt, where periodically on a schedule or on whim, they erase their blog and start it over fresh.  Freedom from the legacy of their past writings is most often cited as the reason to “Burn the Fields” now and again.

The FIFO Shove to Web Oblivion – Is the idea that old posts should “fall off” the blog, being pushed by time or number of new posts.  FIFO (First In – First Out) reflects the idea that the oldest posts drop off first.  A number of authors limit their blogs to only a certain number of visible posts under this idea.

A Few Good Marbles (Save the Best & to the Winds with the Rest) – Is a bit of a hybrid idea.  Here an author focuses their backup on what they feel is their most worthy work (whether by number of hits, number of links, effort put in, or self-critical ranking) and either lets the others go or actually culls the other posts.

Next in this series I’ll look at strategies for the Blog Reader.

73

Steve
K9ZW

From comments, emails and from a list I had started earlier, here are some of the options as a Blogger you could consider for backing up your blog’s content:

Archive.org

The Wayback Machine at Archive.org is an amazing web feature. The idea is websites are crawled and pages that change are archived for future reference.  

It is unclear if Archive.org will crawl & archive all webhosts.  As far as I know WordPress.com and Blogger don’t allow services like Archive.org to crawl their main sites, under the premise that it is not possible to tell a “good Web Bot” from a bad one.

You should be able to use the service on many other hosts and if you self-host.

Though while you can Archive webpages for Free (through Archive.Org) remember it takes 6 to 8 week before it starts, always lags some months behind.  Most material is not available to search for six-months from date of crawl.

URL is http://www.archive.org 

Mirror Sites (Parallel Blogs)

Numerous bloggers regularly port their blog content to a fresh “storage blog” either on the same service or if possible on another service.  Often they mark the new blog as not-indexed or even private.  

Check your present host and potential destination hosts’ FAQs or Help files on Export/Import and Moving Your Blog for more information.

This is a fairly labor intensive process, often images & media does not move with the export, and few bloggers do this often.  But it does have some use and might be part of your once-every-six-months portion of your back-up plan as another option.

Own the Server & Self-backup

Many bloggers buy hosting space, or even put you their own physical server at some point in time. 

Once you have your own server the backup options are numerous – RAID hard drive setups, Tape/Cartridge Backups, Mirror Sites – many options that deserve more detail than this overview of options.  

Talk with the system admins if a hosted space, and pick your own poison if your are physically going to run a server for your blog.

RSS Feed & Store

A variation of the “Email to Self” method of backing up information, several bloggers wrote that they locally archive the RSS full feeds for their blogs and periodically dump those archives onto storage media (CD ROM or Flash Drives mostly).

The plus to this system is it can be fairly automatic.  The downside is most RSS feeds are not configured to pass on the images and media for your blog.  It is also a “bits & pieces” collection, rather than a true restore from this database backup.

“Donate a Copy” to a Webmetrics but Persistent Archive (Google)

A variation on the RSS Feed & Store, some bloggers apparently direct their RSS to a persistent email account, like Google’s GMail, or save copies in Google Docs.

These types of “free storage” opportunities have a could shortcomings – your data is open to their webmetric indexing as part of your agreement, you have to just “trust them” that your data will remain online, and if you go dormant for a period they may stop retaining your data.  

Paid-For Archival Service (Carbonite , Bloggled)

A number of emails & comments mention pay-services to back up your blog.  The on-line archival options, like the popular Carbonite, focus on doing file or disk backup, and as far as their on-line documentation showed, they do not have any back-up options tailored to blogs.

New are a few blog back-up services.  Blogger Blogs can be backed up up Bloggled and there has been an on-again/off-again demo of an archival service for WordPress hosted blogs.

Laize Faire & Burn the Fields

Several Bloggers regularly erase & start again, considering their blogs as transient writings, rather than as material suitable for archiving.  

One wonders if that is really what they are saying, as most do seem to keep backups of their work, periodically reissuing and/or recycling the best of their work.  

They do gain an opportunity to disappear their worst writing, touch up the stuff in the middle, and promote their finest, by cleaning out their on-line presentation periodically.

If it Isn’t in Print, It simply Isn’t

One correspondent wrote that unless it is printed out on paper and stored in his file cabinet, that in his mind it was “temporary” information.

Not certain how he indexes his saved work, and it certainly isn’t really a backup if you would have to retype every letter & word.

But he will have a copy if the net is down and if the power is out.

A variation on this theme is some of the backup services are offering a print-to-book, where they help you move your blog content into a printed book.

Combined Stratigies

There is a part of almost every one of these ideas that appeals, and a different risk-mitigation provided by each one.

It would seem a strong tailor combination of strategies would very much protect your blog.

Please email or leave comments with more ideas, and check back in the next days for a list of backup ideas for the reader’s of blogs.

73

Steve
K9ZW

Imagine waking up one morning, taking your first cup of coffee over to your computer with a plan on writing a new blog entry, only to find your blog’s host is down.

Scot K9JY found his hosting service had become unreliable and write of his transition: New Hosting Company for K9JY.com

….. I have given the posting a break because of a problem: my previous hosting company has become steadily unreliable.

This unreliable service translates to readers as “500 Internal Server Error” messages, long load times, “Hello, World” postings, and — my favorite — presenting an “install WordPress” option as the home page. This allows anyone on the planet to not only overwrite my version of the software on the system, it gives them access to the entire site! Wonderful!

And clearly unacceptable. ……

Scott W4PA had announced he was stopping his blog (and taking a break from Radio Contesting) in a message that few of us read, as his Blog Host service went down, and it seems for good:

Tuesday:

Journalspace is no more.

DriveSavers called today to inform me that the data was unrecoverable.

Here is what happened: the server which held the journalspace data had two large drives in a RAID configuration. As data is written (such as saving an item to the database), it’s automatically copied to both drives, as a backup mechanism.

The value of such a setup is that if one drive fails, the server keeps running, using the remaining drive. Since the remaining drive has a copy of the data on the other drive, the data is intact. The administrator simply replaces the drive that’s gone bad, and the server is back to operating with two redundant drives.

But that’s not what happened here. There was no hardware failure. Both drives are operating fine; DriveSavers had no problem in making images of the drives. The data was simply gone.Overwritten.

The data server had only one purpose: maintaining the journalspace database. There were no other web sites or processes running on the server, and it would be impossible for a software bug in journalspace to overwrite the drives, sector by sector.

The list of potential causes for this disaster is a short one. It includes a catastrophic failure by the operating system (OS X Server, in case you’re interested), or a deliberate effort. A disgruntled member of the Lagomorphics team sabotaged some key servers several months ago after he was caught stealing from the company; as awful as the thought is, we can’t rule out the possibility of additional sabotage.

But, clearly, we failed to take the steps to prevent this from happening. And for that we are very sorry.

So, after nearly six years, journalspace is no more.

If you haven’t yet, visit Dorrie’s Fun Forum; it’s operated by a long-time journalspace member. If you’re continuing your blog elsewhere, you can post the URL there so people can keep up with you.

We’re considering releasing the journalspace source code to the open source community. We may also sell the journalspace domain and trademarks. Follow us on twitter at twitter.com/jsupgradesfor news.

And large numbers of Amateur Radio websites of all sorts went down as Al K3TKJ retired (no idea if this was announced in advance or widely known) and all QSL.net and QTH.net hosted services are being migrated to Scott KA9FOX (QTH.com appears unaffected):

 
QSL.net & QTH.net Announcement

December 31, 2008

Dear fellow hams,

After 13 years of providing hams with no cost web space, e-mail forwarding and mailing list services through QSL.net and QTH.net, I have decided to retire. All QSL.net and QTH.net servers and Internet connections at my home QTH are being turned down.

Scott KA9FOX has graciously decided to pick up where I left off, and he is in the process of migrating all services to new hardware. See below for an update on the status of the migration.

I want to thank all of you for all of your support over the years, and I hope that you will support Scott as he takes over the reigns.

See you on the air!

73 – Al Waller, K3TKJ

Server Migration Update from Scott KA9FOX

Last Update: Dec 31, 2008 21:34z

Thank you for your patience as this transition is made. All qsl.net/qth.net services are being moved onto brand new hardware in a well-connected data center in the central US. This web page will be updated so you can stay informed of the progress.

If you would like to make a contribution to support my efforts to keep QSL.net / QTH.net on the web, see the Donation Page.

SERVICE SERVER STATUS
Web Sites www.qsl.net
(ftp.qsl.net) Original server down, User data being transported to data center. ETA Jan 3rd, 2009.
Mailing Lists mailman.qth.net Original server still up, data will be migrated shortly. Expect some downtime during transition.
E-mail Forwarding mail.qsl.net Original server still up, data will be migrated shortly. Expect some downtime during transition.
DX Info/Log Search dx.qsl.net Original server still up, data will be migrated shortly. Expect some downtime during transition.

On the bright side Scot K9JY was able to recognize his old host’s problems in the making, and fully port everything he wanted to retain to a new hosting service.

Scott W4PA had announced his refocus and end-of-blog so his project’s continuity was not as a critical when Journalspace crashed & burned.

The QSL.net/QTH.net services being affected are greatly mailing lists and are transitioning in an orderly fashion. Downtime hopefully will be only the time the Internet’s DNS server systems need to populate the new server information.

But do you as a writer have a good plan to back up parts of your web-presence that you would like to keep no matter what?

And those of you who are readers, do you have a a system to save web-information you want for future reference? Remember bookmarking the URL is not going to be much use if that page disappears from the web.

Very interested in your thinking and planning along these lines!

More to follow in additional posts,

73

Steve
K9ZW