Archiving content from GeoCities websites

I suggest this be 'stickied' until geocities is confirmed history.

i have made an archive of collective action notes, available here.

for anyone trying to automatically download material from geocities with a web crawler, be forewarned that geocities has some pretty nasty code in place to shut down sites if it thinks someone is doing a recursive crawl - you need to set really high intervals of time between document requests, ideally randomized, all of which linux tools like wget will do, but it might take multiple tries and a bit of frustration.

Red and Black Notes is another site that will need to be copied.

All the Undercurrent stuff (assuming there is no more online than the three issues here) is already in libcom's library. I might start copying the rest of the Antagonism site across, as it's not particularly huge and won't seem overwhelming.

I will just copy and paste things as library entries rather than all into one .csv, as that way I will be able to preview whether I've fucked up the formatting.

One question - Antagonism has a few things translated into Turkish, Russian and Greek; John Gray has lots of stuff in French, Italian, German etc. Do we want to copy this across as well, or just stick with Englsih for the moment? Obviously we'll need speakers of those languages to write the intro/summaries, and with some of the Antagonism stuff, even to identify what the article actually is. I can do this for German but nothing else. For the moment I'll stick with copying English stuff, anyway.

Also some stuff on No War But The Class War that may be worth copying, although most of it is reproduced either here, or on the sites listed above.

russian sector is stored on revolt.anho.org

johm - nice work on the crawling, I think that's the best bet to ensure there's at least one copy of everything before they're all taken down.

The John Gray site is in the process of moving itself and might even get around to adding some new content. Mirroring texts is an excellent idea but you might want to start with those sites which are truly dead rather than just smelling funny. (Note that some sites which have already moved like Class Against Class haven't taken all the old content with them).

Collective Action Notes is still active as far as I can see - I don't know what it's relocation plans are but with this and any other active sites it would be a good idea to find out and put a link back to the relocated pages on your mirror. (Aside from anything else one consequence of geocities closing is that a fair bit of communist and anarchist stuff will disappear from the first pages of google seaches).

As important as archiving texts is archiving old links. Many sites and texts are already archived in the Internet Archive (including some that are no longer up in reality). Wthout the original page links it's not easy to find them there.

http://www.geocities.com/ncajsa/ I know Little Brother on here was active in that, he might have some other geocities sites that need archiving if you pm him.

commie zero zero
Workers Councils And Autonmous Workers Struggles
Wage Slave X's Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Homepage
Subversion
Red & Black Notes
Practical History
for communism

The first two just contain links to stuff on John Gray, CAN etc. I think the person who does 'Wage Slave X' posts here; no idea if they have plans to relocate the site, maybe they can post if they want it copied?

I think the Subversion archive has already been reproduced both here and on af-north.org. Practical History probably has a few things worth copying, though.

Just added On the Content of Socialism, Part One.
From Class Against Class
Libcom had parts two and three but not one.

necessary bump

Not a problem.

So I'm a bit unclear, sorry - can we have

(1) geocities sites that have been successfully saved [and if other than Libcom],

(2) sites that are partly saved, but still have parts in need of saving, and

(3) sites that noone that we know of has done anything about saving yet and someone should get on it?

It's just a way to try to be sure that it all gets done and we don't trip over each other, letting some rare stuff fall through the cracks. Isuppose it's like a checklist or scorecard, sorta, or I guess a glorified Libcom Geocities project 'to do' list, just to keep track?

It justs seems that the effort seems kind of scattered right now, (though great efforts by some are to be cheered *Thank you,comrades*

What do you think?

I'm not too aware of what is more rare than other stuff, but maybe if people continously updated their post, adding what they've added to libcom, so we dont post the same stuff or spend time on formatting stuff thats already been done?

i dont dunno, an idea.

So far from me:
-The Communist Tendency in History from Practical History
-THE SHOW IS OVER! by Point Blank! from Subversion
-The Capitalist State: Illusion and Critique by Werner Bonefeld from Insurrection Raven

By the way, if the stuff I'm contributing is not formatted correctly or could be done better, let me know. Adding things to a non-blog site is new to me and I'm just trying to help where I can.

Ok, I've copied about 2/3 of the stuff from Antagonism, and will probably move onto Red and Black Notes after that. John Gray, Collective Action Notes and Class Against Class are probably the most important ones to save, but given they've either already been backed up or are going to be, this is no longer as crucial.

As far as double-posting goes, just put the name of the text into google along with "site:libcom.org" (don't need the quotes) and it should bring up any duplicates. Sometimes there are slight variations in the titles though, so for existing authors it's probably worth cross-checking with the tag for that author.

Speaking of duplicates, I've noticed these so far, and I'm sure others will emerge along the way:

http://libcom.org/library/politics-herman-gorter-anton-pannekoek
http://libcom.org/library/the-politics-of-gorter-pannekoek

http://libcom.org/library/content-socialism-1-socialisme-ou-barbarie
http://libcom.org/library/content-socialism-socialisme-ou-barbarie

Also, I wasn't sure whether to copy the copy of Pannekoek's 'Party and Class' from the Antagonism site. As far as I can tell, it is the same text as 'Party and Working Class' in the library here, but a different translation. The Antagonism one reads better, IMO.

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/geocities/close/

It's closing in October and it looks like everything will be deleted if it isn't saved or preserved.

I think the formatting you use is fine, but just to nitpick, can you not capitalise all the key words in the title? Just the first one and any relevant ones after (i.e. place/people names etc).

As for tagging, I think we've got Leninism/Trotskyism/Maoism tags that you could use instead of 'the left'.