Static Website Archive
Since going online with the much reduced static website I’ve gotten email and comments that run along the lines of “Hey, I was reading that stuff, it was useful, why’d you take it down, put it back.” In general such email/comments seem to suggest that I am doing the world a great disservice by not leaving all that stuff up on the web and I’ve got some vaguely articulated obligation to put it back, soonest. Some of this email has been somewhat less than completely polite.
I will just observe that for the past five years or so, essentially ALL of the stuff I’ve gotten rid of had a paypal button on it, and a bit of text that said “Is this article useful to you? If you think so, please consider a voluntary donation.”
None of the people complaining about my getting rid of this stuff donated.
So I propose the following simple plan. If someone wants me to dig something out of the archived old website and put it up on the new one, I’ll be happy to do it. All you need to do is make a small but reasonable donation to show me you’re not just valuing my time and energy at zero. That is, put your money where your mouth is.
Please send your donations to my local food bank (http://www.hope-link.org/takeaction/donate) or to my local branch of Habitat for Humanity (http://www.habitatekc.org/). Email me a copy of the confirmation or receipt, and let me know which page or pages you’d like resurrected. Let’s set the rate at, say, $10 per page. If you have some objection to those two charities, let me know and we can negotiate some mutually agreeable charity.
Musings on Photography 
Excellent, Paul. It’s easy to ask for something gratis, let’s see what comes of this. Hopefully the food bank and Habitat will got some money …, but I doubt it.
I’d suggest you put a page up with a list of your articles..
I’m happy to pay $10 to get the Rodenstock literature back up and hosted somewhere (I’m happy to put it on my server if thats OK).
Good idea! Who knows maybe Habitat and the food bank will wind up scrathing there heads trying to figure out the sudden spike in donations
Great idea Paul.
Lets hope that the food bank & Habitat get something out of this.
But, I am not holding my breath.
I’d suggest you put a page up with a list of your articles..
Fair point. I’ll look into that at the same donation rate as putting up a old page – in other words, a $10 donation buys (beyond the good done by the donation) the time and effort it will take me to put up an index of the material that got left behind.
I’m happy to pay $10 to get the Rodenstock literature back up and hosted somewhere (I’m happy to put it on my server if thats OK).
The directory that housed the Rodenstock literature contains 74 separate html files. I’m guessing there isn’t $740 bucks worth of demand, and most of those files were machine generated anyway, and the appropriate thing to do would be to write a script that generates new ones. But frankly I’d like to be shut of the whole thing, and so if you’d like, send me email, I’ll put the images up somewhere you can grab them, and you can take over responsibility for all that stuff – and I’ll thank you for doing it.
I feel obliged to warn you that hosting that Rodenstock literature has been a significant pain in the butt. People tend to link directly to the images and steal bandwidth that way, despite my pleas that they not do that. People email with questions, despite my protestations that I don’t have more info than is there.
So while I admire you for wanting to take it on, you should know that it’s not going to be something you do and having done it, it requires no effort. Expect a low but non-zero level of irritation.
People tend to link directly to the images and steal bandwidth that way…
Yes, but there are other hosting solutions than having your own server which I’m guessing you do. There are plenty of free places to put a bunch of files up on and let people link to them there, and let them deal with the consequence of that site being down or disappearing someday.
There are plenty of free places to put a bunch of files up on and let people link to them there, and let them deal with the consequence of that site being down or disappearing someday.
I’m glad to hear that you’ve invested the time figuring out another hosting solution for those Rodenstock files. As I said, send me email, I’ll make the files available, and you can own the whole thing.
-p
Nice plan!
I thoroughly approve of this. Good idea, and I hope it works out for you, the readers, and your charities.
Dear Paul,
it seems you are pretty upset about these things. I’ve written a rather long-ish reply, which probably would have offended you as well (I’m not very good at being not offensive). I will spare further comments and simply grieve for a while.
Maybe sometime I will be able not to grieve about things lost, but rejoice that they existed.
chris
Chris-
You seem quite upset about this. I didn’t expect that people would experience sadness at the disappearance of the articles, let alone grief.
However, if your grief is not sufficient to motivate you to contribute to the effort needed to resurrect the abandoned material, your grief is also not sufficient to motivate me to spend my time resurrecting it.
It’s also not sufficient to generate much sympathy from me.
Paul, I can host any large-format related material on the largeformatphotography.info site, which has enough computing resources. Despite us having strictly adhered to a non-commercial policy, I have a bit of spare change that I could donate to your charities if you would accept a “volume deal”, since it would be less work for you to send me all the files as is, than to dig out individual files on demand and format them.