Re: 2009 in review

[dog_cow@macgui.com (D Finnigan)]

A2Aviator wrote:
> The goal is a
> database of material and Apple II specific software on par with that
> of textfiles.com, and not a duplication of such, as along the way,
> anything that fits into other archive/projects like that would be
> cataloged and contributed to those specific areas as well.
> 
> ..sounds like a big undertaking, and it is. But I think it can be done
> if I can figure out the backing on it.
> 
> Tony
>

The Mac GUI Vault project ( http://macgui.com/vault/ ) took me an entire
year-- I started in September of 2008 and finally got it online in September
of 2009. But that was Apple II and Macintosh, roughly 29,000 programs,
photos, and text files online today, and I've got 6.5 million Usenet
articles which still aren't online. Out of that, less than 1,000 items were
from my own collection; most of it was stuff I'd compiled from other sites.

What took the longest was sorting it all. The big archives like Asimov and
UMich were sorted, so they were easy, what took longest were the little
sites which had a mish-mash of unsorted files. Fortunately, I had some help
by writing programs to automatically generate titles and import the files
into a MySQL database.

So it's a lot of hard work! Probably the best thing to do is to not make any
pre-release announcements, but rather work on it in secret, then let us all
know when it's done or 90%+ done, or if you never get it done, then there's
no shame, since we never expected it. :-)