Re: Apple II wiki

["Warren Ernst" <wernst@gmail.com>]

OK, well, I think we're all moving in the right direction here.

The offer to use the apple2guide.net is a good idea, and well
appreciated by myself.

The idea of public backups, Gabriel, is EXACTLY because of the reason
you nonchelantly laughed off: what would happen to all of our work and
all this material IF YOU DID (accidentally) DIE?

If you wanted to stop managing an Apple II Wiki one day by your own
choice, I have no doubt that you'd want to pass the content (backup
files, passwords, or whatever) on to someone else, and it would live
on. But what if they keys to the Wiki were held ONLY by someone who had
something sudden and unfortunate happen to him? Hey, stuff happens.

The whole point of a publicly available backup is so that various
people (or indeed, ANYONE) can, at any time, download a backup of the
wiki with the ability to re-build it somewhere else if necessary. Then,
god forbid, at some day in the future when the site stops working and
you stop responding to emails because you had a stroke, were in a plane
crash, or whatever horrible event occurred, the site can keep running
on a new server.

A Wiki site is not just a flat collection of HTML or Text files (at
least not normally, depending on the Wiki package). It is a collection
of php script files, configuration files, a MySQL (or other type of )
database file, any special .htaccess files, and a master admin password
for the site. ALL of this needs to get periodically and automatically
backed up, and the backup file made available for download. Making the
master password both private (to avoid hacking) AND public (to allow
the site to be rebuilt) is the sticky wicket. Maybe someone has an idea
about that.

But some mechanism like this HAS to be done before I would spend any
meaningful amount of time contributing to it. Or the mechanism at least
has to be thought about and a plan of action described first. Some sort
of non-profit group is one mechanism that accomplishes this. Public
backup files are another, and a lot easier. I'm sure there must be
others too.

I don't mean to be a wet blanket here. If I am, I'm very sorry.

But I've been in the business long enough to have seen, with my own
eyes, important one-man-shows disappear because the "one-man" that ran
it, disappeared first, to the detriment of the community, hobby, or
businesses that relied on it. Maintaining an Apple II Encyclopedia is
the same thing.

-Warren Ernst
(former Beagle Bros)