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Word Pressing Times

Head Rambles Posted on by

One or two of you may have noticed my absence yesterday?

It’s not that I had nothing to write about [which I didn’t, really..] so much as having a very full plate.

There is a project underway and has been since the weekend.

One of Anna Raccoon’s wishes was that her old site be retained.  Unfortunately she had deleted it so that was a little difficult.  It was time to put some heads together, so there is a joint effort between The Blocked Dwarf, Mr G [Anna’s husband who fully supports the project], from Dr.Mark Smith of Edinburgh University and a tiny drop of technical stuff from myself.

It ain’t easy.

So far we have recovered  nearly 1,500 posts from Anna’s PC, courtesy of Mr G.

Those posts come as single files, each containing around 30 files of code and images.  So now I have 60,000 files on my laptop, and what do I do with them?

With a drop of coding trickery I have managed to recreate the 1,500 posts, but then there are images scattered amongst all those 60,000 files, spread through 1,500 folders, and a load of them are duplicated.  Fun stuff to get one’s head around?

It will take a while yet as it is very much a work in progress.

There is also the severe problem that I run a test and then get totally distracted, reading the post I have tested.  There are some real gems in there.

Around 1,500 of them to be precise.

 

Comments

Word Pressing Times — 42 Comments

  1. “then get totally distracted, reading the post I have tested. There are some real gems in there.”

    *thought to himself: “I’d better just check a few of those MTHML files of her posts before I upload them for Granddad”* …and suddenly an hour had just disappeared. I blame Brexit.

    • I keep telling myself that there is work to be done.

      Then I tell myself it can wait until I have finished reading this……..

  3. Just had an email from one of the Raccoon’s most loyal fans who said this:

    “That’ll be quite a task, although very much worthwhile.  A lot of work
    and thought went in to those articles and they impinged on much about
    which, thanks to the mainstream media, people are usually misinformed.
    It won’t be the same without her contribution”

    So I’ll answer his last point publicly here and correct a slight misunderstanding (my fault for not being clearer) . The Raccoonstituted blog is intended as an archive, not a going concern. There may be an element of Raccoon related updates to it but that is something for down the road (for example I may scan in the ‘Best Of’ book she published and presented to a few close friends.).

    • The site will make it quite clear that it is an archive.  There won’t be any facilities to comment on the posts or anything like that.

      It is in effect a ‘Best of’ website containing as much material as we can collect.

    • He was on Monday morning , infact I was very impressed at how he was coping. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find him surrounded by the corpses of John Walker and friends but he was up and dressed, busy and had already put the house back the way it should be (G is a little OCD). Her computer was back on her desk, with her vape next to it and he was looking forwarded to a buying something non-mush for lunch.

  5. I would like to help if I may.

     

    You remember Gildas? Well a couple of years ago he manually downloaded many Raccoon posts, I think he did it expecting the blog to close down. I might be able to get a copy.

    Also there was that academic from Edinburgh who got a backup of the blog in the middle of the Savile period.

    I am also a computer programmer, so if I can help in any way let me know. I am experienced in writing perl scripts to parse and process text files amongst other things.

     

    daed.parrot@gmail.com

     

    • Oh bugger ! I had totally forgotten Gildas saying he’d made a back up. Please do ask him if you are in contact with him.

      The ‘academic’ you refer to is the Dr.Mark Smith in Granddad’s post. They have a copy (not sure yet how complete) of the blog upto 2015ish.

    • Thanks for the offer!  Actually the programming part is more or less complete apart from a few tweaks.  The hard part was extracting the “pure post and comments” from the mass of code that made up each page, breaking it into the various fields for the database and rewriting all the links to images [as the whole structure is different from the original].

      The next task is purely formatting the site into a presentable theme.

      And then the next phase – inserting all the other posts that I can find from around the Interwebs…………

    • What else would I be doing?  [Apart from taming the garden, cooking, washing up, tidying the house, shopping and all the minor incidentals in life?]

  7. Well done!

    No one is dead if they live in our hearts and nothing ever leaves the internet!

    • nothing ever leaves the internet!

      True but some stuff is really well hidden at the back of the shed between the dried paint tins, the broken hedge trimmer, the rusty tools and that Home Brew Kit you got 15 years previous….

      Or as the song say “We’re up all night to wget lucky”.

  8. I do not know who runs the Martin Scriblerus site, but can I propose that on its front page, or home page, or whatever you call it, there is a permanent memorial to her. Maybe one of her blog headers.

    Also to whoever runs the Martin Scriblerus site, Thankyou. You have introduced me to a wonderful set of bloggers.

     

    • As i understand it , Scriblerus is for blogs which are updated regularly but perhaps they would make an exception for AR’s archive , a discreet perma-link perhaps in their member’s blog rolls or ‘other stuff’ links list?

    • Some of it is there but there’s an awful lot missing-especially the earlier posts I believe.

      • To give an idea of Wayback – I tested this site.  There are the best part of 4,000 posts over 11 years, and Wayback holds a mere 305 “saves”.  A hell of a lot of gaps?  The same problem arises with Anna’s site.

        I now have most if not all posts from January 2009 to September 2013. After that, its a case of manual searching Wayback and any other sources.

        • It would help no end if there were at least a ‘master list’ of all her posts (and the dates posted).

          • And therein lies a problem.  A list would be enormous.  My preliminary efforts show a list of months with the number of posts in each month, but as I said – preliminary.  More research to be done…

            • I meant a simple list ie

              01.01.09 Hello World

              02.01.09 Hellow World are you listening

              03.01.09 Fuck this for a game of soldiers
              etc

              It would be long, for sure. She liked to post daily when possible, it was important to her. So that’s an average of maybe 350 posts a year for what 8 years? So the better part of 3k posts?   Long but a real help when we’re looking for posts on dusty FTP servers. Like with Pokemon- gotta catch them all.

  10. Grandad, a real test of your ingenuity would be to publish the entire archive in the Branford Magazine format. 😉

  11. Why do people delete their websites? Why spend thousands of hours producing something, only to throw it all away? I can understand people doing it if the stuff they’ve created fills whole rooms, and they can’t cart it around with them any more. But websites aren’t like that.

    I’m never going to delete any of my websites or blogs.

    • I can understand it, though it’s unlikely I would ever kill off my own.  Anna was going through a very bad time and made a spot decision to pull the plug. It was an act she sincerely regretted with hindsight.

      When you think about it, it’s incredibly simple thing to do – one mouse-click and it’s all gone [mind you, you have to know where to click!].

       

    • She not only regretted it but was distraught (as near as she ever got to being distraught) when she began to realize it might be impossible to raccoonstitute it.  I am thankful i got to tell her it looked like it would indeed be possible just a few days before she died. But i regret not having chance to tell her to her face how much work GD & others were putting in on her behalf. For understandable reasons she stopped reading her mails a couple of days beforehand .

      As GD said she was in a bad place when she deleted it, an almost perfect storm of Bad Shit. I don’t know how i would have reacted in her shoes but  expect i’d be trying to delete myself not just a blog.

  12. Hi GD,

    Bing seems to have some cached pages going back a few years.

    Nov 2014, ‘Lest We Forget’: http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=anna+raccoon+parish+notice&d=4559156759960590&mkt=en-GB&setlang=en-US&w=milzOzhOKFwZQ854GIdsoFEGciV9a1ns

    June 2014 ‘Caridade Caritas’: http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=anna+raccoon+2014&d=4603742807919712&mkt=en-GB&setlang=en-US&w=qOjrd7uSGqktil4Nyf4zM6NVUqeAB8P9

    Nov 2014 ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie: http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=anna+raccoon+january+2014&d=4966671765078678&mkt=en-GB&setlang=en-US&w=zaV9UyLZFR_SlIcroRj8dTqN3L89AzF4

    It’s a bit hit and miss as some others I tried were gone, and obviously i don’t know how many you’ve already got, but maybe a possible source to find a few more? Anyway, a great endeavour by you and the team, I only learnt about Anna recently and I look forward to the archive.

    • Can you clarify a little please, you have a wget of the blog up to 23.11.16  or just the post of that date?

      • It’s a wget of the entire site at that date. 28,250 items, totaling 3.7 GB, because it recurses up all the comments multiple times. The posts go back to 2009. I archived it when the landlady posted the Parish Notice on November 23, 2016 “On January 30 2017, the blog is primed to self combust.”

        IIRC this was the restored site after the first deletion but can’t remember the details.

        Happy to bung it onto a DVD and post or drop off (I’m south Cambridge UK), let me know…

        • Outstanding! Thank you. I’ll leave GD to talk to you about the technical details. With the news we’ve  had today from Dr.Smith, Daed.Parrot & now yourself the project begins to look far more viable than I had thought…who knows, we may yet get ALL posts.

          I asked the Chief Reform Rabbi to mention us & the project to the HaShem this night in her prayers, seems for once HE was listening.

          • Better late than never.  Have just bunged off a mail to Gareth [assuming the email address is correct].

             

  15. Ima give my condolences  to Mr G , Anna and I werent the best of pals until the end when we had a mutal respect.

     

    she sent a really nice message by twitter .

     

    Funnily enough I miss the old bat lighting a candle for her each night.

     

    Ima sure she is looking down and cheering you on..and I have tae thank her for her kind words and v important info

     

     

     

     

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