Ok! I am declaring the website to be "alpha" (“α”). Which just means that I won't be able to touch it for a month, so it's a good time to start letting a few friends take a look at it.
I'm not sure who yet (probably Isaac, for enthusiasm, and maybe a couple of CDG folks because that's what the archive currently covers), but feel free to select a friend or two and let me know.
(I made a mistake in my last email, we'll actually be back on Jan 13.)
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For people taking a look, here are some things that I'm looking for.
- Enthusiasm! This is a huge project covering a decade of frequently emotional history, and cheerleading is welcome.
- Permission / blessing, from those whose work and words are archived. As editor, I've tried to frame all the work as respectfully as I could, and avoid or redact any emails that people wouldn't want public, but everyone will eventually need to sign off before this goes public.
- Contributions, in the form of additional media or additional writings. If someone wants to add more context to a project, the simplest way might just be to write something up and email it to me, and I'll add the email itself to the archive item.
- Constructive suggestions.
- Accepting the premise (that the website is a screen-based view into a Realtalk space, not a rendering of a virtual space) and helping it become the best that, instead of not that.
Because the archive hasn't caught up to the Dynamicland community space yet, there's not currently a lot for Dynamicland community folks to respond to, but we can gradually start looping people in so they can start thinking about it.
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Notes on privacy:
- The only media and emails on the public server are those explicitly included in an archive item. Nothing else leaves the hard drive.
- All jpegs, videos, and audios are re-encoded, with all metadata stripped except for timestamps.
- All emails go through the redactor, which removes passwords, email addresses, phone numbers, certain names, faux pas, and literally anything else that you'd like redacted, just ask.
Notes on accessibility:
- For publications that are photos of text, the full text is in the img's "alt" attribute, and links have "title" attributes.
- For publications that are videos, the full transcript is in the HTML.
- Everything should still be navigable with stylesheets disabled or JavaScript disabled.
- JavaScript is minimal (a couple pages, as needed) with no frameworks or other dependencies (other than YouTube embeds).
- The structure of every HTML file is fairly simple, so as to be easily parsed with external scripts.
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Front shelf todo:
- 5-minute intro
- People
- FAQ
Publications todo:
- Improvising cellular playgrounds in Realtalk
- Communal computing for 21st-century science
- Hypercard in the World
- video descriptions (as per Shawn's comments)
Archive todo:
- Currently, everything after early 2016 is either placeholder or missing. (Definitely won't be completed this year, but what is there should be made good.)
- Some iframe embeds (esp. Glen and Toby's sites,
e.g.) don't show up under https, because you can't embed an http iframe under https. The best solution would be for those projects to be mirrored on
dynamicland.org for archival purposes; that's what I did with embeds from my own site (
e.g.), and I'll be encouraging the CDG folks to do the same.