FOSS4G'13

The working site for the conference committee of FOSS4G 2013

Website

Posted by Jo Cook on September 29, 2013

Hi All,

To keep the ongoing costs down, I downgraded the amazon instance that we're using to host the FOSS4G website from a medium to a small. I'd like to start thinking about what we are going to do with the site- old FOSS4G sites generally go to the OSGeo vms to retire but my understanding is that these are pretty simple beasts and we'd have to do quite a lot of work to exactly replicate the site.

Has anyone got any thoughts as to what we could do to make the process of replication easier? I like the idea of making everything as static as possible, but I don't know how achievable that is. A quick google found this post: http://floatleft.com/notebook/archiving-an-old-wordpress-site/ about archiving a wordpress site as plain html- which seems imminently sensible. What do you think about the other aspects of the site? What do we need to keep?

Whatever we do, I vote for something that requires the barest minimum of future work from us :-)

Thanks

Jo

Comments

Barry Rowlingson on September 29, 2013:

Countdown to MySQL crashing.. 10....9....

I think all the stuff I've done in django can be made static except for (obviously?) adding pledges, voting on the maps, and favouriting presentations, all of which are disabled or pointless now anyway.

Things might break if I've not used relative paths everywhere, depending on how smart the thing that makes the static version is. It might even be doable by some options or wrapper on curl or wget.

Do we need OJS now? Perhaps it has some kind of archive/export so we have the referees reports.

maptember.org can live just about anywhere :)

Barry Rowlingson on September 29, 2013:

I'm running a wget mirroring now on the site, will let you know how it goes later.

Jo Cook on September 30, 2013:

We could do with chucking that into the OSGeo svn at least- Jeff McKenna is very keen on that... happy for me to try this plugin for creating a static site?

OJS- I couldn't see anything on the interwebs about it- what would we want to keep?

Barry Rowlingson on September 30, 2013:

I've got an almost working static mirror made with simply "wget -mk http://2013.foss4g.org/" - the only tweaking then needed seems to be getting rid of the version query strings on some of the files. Will try and make it public later. The problem testing at the moment is its hard to know if the web page is still going to the live site to get anything! (some local DNS tweaking might help here... hmmm... or just checking the debugging...)

OJS contains all the referees' reports and decision process for the academic track. What do Franz-Josef and Barend want to do with it is the question.

Barend Köbben on September 30, 2013:

Certainly until the AT papers are all published, I'd like to keep the OJS "live". Not sure a static version is needed after that. The Call for Papers and general description are in the WordPress site.  I'd hope that if the Portland team would want to set up their own OJS they could migrate ours onto their servers (or the OSGEO ones) in some way...

Ian Edwards on September 30, 2013:

Barry - if you're testing locally then why not just unplug your internet
connection? You should soon see whether you've got an entirely local
version.

Barry Rowlingson on September 30, 2013:

But if you unplug from the internet... don't you unplug in real life?

Thanks, I might try that too, but the easiest thing is probably just to grep the files for http: URLs.

Franz-Josef Behr on September 30, 2013:

I second the position of Barend. OJS should be available at least until the AT papers are all published. I'd prefer 1 month afterwards.
Regarding the port to Portland: I am not sure if it makes sense, i.e. if the prefedined letter etc can be exported. We should provide the contact information of thr reviewers.

Addy Pope on October 1, 2013:

+1 to Barend's suggestion.  I am wading through Academic Bursary write ups which SF wants published on the website.

Barry Rowlingson on December 3, 2013:

Mirroring the web site is sorted, however the size of the map gallery may be a problem. I've got it down to 347M of PDFs and JPGs that are essential to the gallery site. This does not include the files for the iPad wall, which included a large number of huge jpegs.

Who in OSGeo do I ask to check that I can check in over 400M of stuff to the SVN repo?

Jo Cook on December 4, 2013:

I think you can probably ask on the web list- it's worth remembering that there will be LOADS of additional stuff as well when we archive all the basecamp files

Jo Cook on December 4, 2013:

I'm wgetting basecamp as we speak with a little help from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2086184/exporting-files-from-basecamp so I'll respond to your discussion on the osgeo list when I know how big that's going to be.

Jo Cook on December 4, 2013:

First attempt didn't work too well but I think we'll be coming in at around 45MB from what I can tell.

Barry Rowlingson on December 5, 2013:

Note to all that the web site has now been statificated and uploaded to the OSGeo SVN.

So no more changes please. Unless its really important - because even a change to one page is going to mean the whole thing needs restatificating, and then because the sponsors are in random order every page has changed so gets grabbed again, so every page changes in SVN. Ouch.

Steven Feldman on December 5, 2013:

Thanks ever so much Barry