Into The Mirror-World

I just wanted to give a brief update to last week's post about backing up a blog. Right at the very end of the editing process, after I'd finished writing the thing and was just reading it back for a final time, it began to come back to me that I might have written something on the subject once before.

I checked the insanely long tag tail at the end of the blog, a growing problem about which I really ought to do something, if only I had any idea what, and found I had indeed created a tag for "back-up. It had just a single entry, which turned out to be a post I'd written all the way back in 2012, for the first Newbie Blogger Initiative.

The NBI, as a few people will remember, was something started by Syp of Bio Break and Massively (As it was then) to encourage would-be bloggers to give it a try. The idea was to provide a platform to kick off from and also to offer advice and support to those who were just starting. To that end, Syp invited a number of established bloggers to become Mentors for the event and even though in 2012 I'd only been at the blogging game for less than a year, one of the people he invited was me.

For reasons best known to my 2012 self, I chose to make this public in a post written in the style of Damon Runyon. A good piece of advice to would-be bloggers might be not to do that sort of thing.

Despite the mis-placed sense of play, I took my new responsibilities quite seriously even though, unsurprisingly, I had very little in the way of advice to offer that other, more experienced bloggers, weren't already providing. Scratching around for something to say that hadn't been said already, I hit on the idea of backing up your blog, a topic that was very fresh in my mind following an incident where Blogger had decided out of the blue to remove my own blog from the platform due to "unauthorized activity".

Obviously, since I'm here talking about it now, I got my blog back although it was quite a traumatic episode at the time. I never did find out what the supposed "unauthorized activity" was and (Fingers crossed, touch wood.) there's been no repeat of the situation since, so presumably whatever I was doing that upset Google, I haven't done it again. 

At the time, though, I was acutely aware of the possibility of a recurrence so I looked around for an insurance policy, using Google Search to do it, naturally. Oh, the painful irony.

My insurance policy turned out to be what I guess we'd now call an app by the name of HTTrack, which describes itself as a "website copier" and "free software offline browser". 

The detailed description tells us that 

"It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure."

I'd used HTTrack back in 2012 to mirror the whole of Inventory Full, all eight or nine months of it. When I checked last week, the files were all still there on my SSD, which I'd cloned from an older HDD when I installed it a year or so back.

On investigation it appeared I'd made also one further back-up a year or two later and then forgotten all about it. That made for an interesting curio but it wasn't going to be much help with the decade of posts that came after.

It seemed unlikely the website would still be there and even less likely that the program would still work. Almost any utility or service I used back in 2012 has either changed out of all recognition or vanished altogether. Still, I thought I might as well take a look.

As you'll see if you click through the link, the HTTrack website is still up and you can still download the software. What's more, it still works! The last update looks to have been around seven years ago but the functionality remains fully intact.

I know that for certain because I now have a complete copy of this blog including every image, link and comment, safely tucked away on an internal drive, with a back-up to the back-up on an external SSD. It runs to just under 30Gb and the download and processing took close to a day and a half. I had to pause it overnight, twice, but it completed flawlessly.

According to the website "HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site", so next time I need to do this I should only have to ask it to add whatever I've posted since. Now I just need to remember to update the mirror more often than once a decade.

The most interesting thing about all of this, from a personal perspective, is that, while having the entire blog available offline in its original format gives me a great sense of security and satisfaction, I find I still much prefer to browse my back pages as the PDFs I was talking about last time. 

In those, the layouts are all over the place, with great swathes of white space and gaps everywhere. The entire look and feel of the blog, on which I spend so much time and effort, is totally screwed up. Nothing is where it should be and everything looks different. I would never design a blog that looks anything like it.

But it reads like a book, not a website, and that makes going back and dipping into it much more appealing. I'm no more likely to go back through the mirror of my blog and read it for pleasure than I ever have been with the online original, which is barely at all, but I've already dotted about in the PDF, picking out pages here and there and reading them for pleasure, as if they'd been written by someone else. I'd still like to have a representative sample bound in an actual paper book some day.

The thrust of much of the conversation around blog back-ups last week revolved not around aesthetics but practicalities. The main concern seemed to be for moving or restoring the blog as a fully-functioning online entity, particularly in respect of keeping the HTML and not having to re-do it all from some other format. I don't know if having the entire thing stored, as-is, offline makes that any easier but I'd be interested to know, if anyone with the technical expertise can elucidate.

It does certainly cover the whole "saving my genius for posterity" aspect, which also came up as a worry, though. For that, HTTrack has you covered. 

Whether posterity will care enough to be glad you made the effort is another question but since the option exists, you might as well take it as not. I have and I recommend it to you all.

If nothing else, you'll have something to look at when the internet goes out.

 

 

Passive-Aggressive Notes On AI Used In This Post

Given current levels of paranoia regarding AI, I thought I might re-institute my lapsed policy of foot-noting any non-human creativity or assistance used in the making of each post. I did kinda think we were over anyone caring about it but it seems not. Plus I always enjoy doing these notes and I kinda miss them.

It is, as I'm sure it won't surprise anyone who's had to do it, quite a challenge, coming up with illustrations for a blog post about the technicalities of blogging. Screen grabs of UIs and clips from websites are a) almost certainly more legally grey than AI images and b) really dull to look at. 

What I like to do instead is to cut and paste a line or a phrase out of the text of the blog itself and hand that off to one of the image generators to see what comes out. The results vary wildly depending on which model is taking a shot at it. Sometimes I get something I can use on the first try, other times it takes a while. 

For the picture at the head of this post I used SDXL Lightning on NightCafe. I left it at the default settings except for changing the format to 4:3 for the second attempt. 

The prompt I used was "download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories".

I was very curious to see what the AI would make of something so dry and non-visual but I ought to have guessed. Both images generated were glamorized visions of cybernauts hacking away in their techno-dens. I imagine there's a lot of stuff like that in the corpus.

I liked the first image but it was the wrong shape and on closer examination the hacker turned out to have three hands. Or maybe she has a three-fingered associate hiding under her desk. I've included it here, so you can take your best guess.

I changed the format and ran the identical prompt again to get the image I used, which does actually look vaguely like me at a certain age. I certainly had that hair-cut once. And those glasses. And that's my nose, give or take. Why he's sitting at that angle to the squodgy keyboards I have no idea but I'm guessing it's like that post-Tarantino fad for holding guns sideways. It just looks cool.

At least he has the right number of arms anyway. And fingers for that matter. Good job SDXL. Have a cyber-cookie!

My Back Pages - Backing Up Your Blog

Over the last few days there's been a small flurry of activity concerning how and when to back up your blog. Aywren and Tipa both posted anecdotal histories on what can happen if you don't pay attention to your past along with advice on how to go about securing its future. There was considerable discussion in the comment threads where, not for the first time, I found myself somewhat out of sync with the general mood. 

Aywren and Tipa each cover the "how and when" quite comprehensively. I'd advise anyone who doesn't already have a back-up plan in place to go read their blogs to find out how it's done. The questions I found myself asking, though, had a lot less to do with how and when and a lot more to do with "why" and "whether". 

When you get to a certain age, it's common for your thoughts to begin to transition from "How can I keep all my stuff safe for the future?" to "How much of this crap do I actually need and how the hell am I going to get rid of the rest?" 

My mother will be ninety-two this year and for at least the last decade, almost every time I've visited her she's tried to send me away with some article of furniture or household appliance she no longer wants. She's been clearing stuff out for as long as I can remember, even though she lives in a fairly big house with a large amount of storage space. 

I'm a quarter of a century younger but I'm already hitting that point where I look around at all I've got and instead of thinking of it as a resource I can lean back into when I get older, I see it as a potential problem I'll have to deal with - and sooner rather than later. 

For decades I've comforted myself  with the thought that "when I retire" I'll be able to re-watch all those movies (I have over a thousand stashed around the house in various formats from VHS to DVD to downloads.), re-read all those books (Also most likely more than a thousand.), listen to all those albums (Do I need to say it again?) and flip through all those comics (We're talking five figures now. Literally around 10,000 of those.) 

The trouble is, I am going to hit official, state retirement age this year and I feel no closer to the moment where I'll feel like sitting back and wallowing in my own history than I was last year or the year before that. I know that people are supposed to become closer to their past the older they get; to remind themselves of the good times by way of of the songs they used to listen to, the tv shows they used to watch and all of that.

Not me. Not all that much, anyway. I was probably more into the nostalgia kick ten or fifteen years ago, when I poked my head up from the gaming hole I'd fallen into and noticed the web had brought a lot of things I'd forgotten back, if not into vogue then at least into contention. I did my share of tourist trips through my teens and twenties then. I kind of feel like I'm over it, now.

Conversely, the older I get, the more interested I become in what's new and what's coming next. For a good while now I've been finding significantly more pleasure in new music, new games, new books, new tv than I have in the old stuff. I'm more excited about what lies ahead than nostalgic for what I've left behind.

And that could be a phase, too. I've been through enough of these attitudinal changes to know that they don't necessarily stick. I won't wake up tomorrow wanting only to listen to music made before 1985 but I recognize that my tastes and desires might slowly drift backwards in time, over time.

When it comes to popular culture, I think I'd have to be unreasonably anxious about the stability of the infrastructure to worry too much about not being able to find a copy of Telegram Sam when I wanted one. If we ever hit the point where we can't go online and immediately immerse ourselves in the melodrama of the video for Cloudbusting - Kate Bush and Donald Sutherland, over-acting shamelessly, as ever - I think we'll already have much bigger problems to worry about, like the collapse of civilization as we know it.

Sadly, I can't make any such confident claims about my own work. If you're a few ladders down from Marc or Kate, as Tipa and Aywren rightly point out, you can't trust faceless corporations to look after your stuff. You need to do that for yourself.

If, that is, you think it's worth it. The big pro in favor of keeping everything backed up is that digital content doesn't take up much space. All those books and comics and albums I mentioned earlier fill whole rooms of our house and Mrs Bhagpuss has almost as much stuff as I do. Together we have far more kipple than we could hope to take with us to a new home, should we ever decide to move to somewhere smaller and more manageable.

Digital files, though, take up almost no space at all. It's easy to get into a state about the clutter on your hard drive but in reality you could carry a dozen HDDs in a carrier bag so what's the problem? And if you store your content in the cloud it's not even you that has to worry about it. (It's the planet but we'd best not get into that right now...)

The question of whether or not to back up my blog rests not on the practical issue of space but on two more existential questions: do I really want all that ephemeral old prose and even if I do, can I be bothered to do anything about it? The answer to the first is probably. The answer to the second is probably not.

I should make it clear out at this point that I do keep up with the minimum required effort involved in backing up my blog. I have every post sent to me by email so all of them are stored wherever the heck Google keeps our Gmail. I never, ever clear my inbox, the contents of which now exceeds 20,000 items and goes back to whenever I opened my account. They're all in there, somewhere. It also seems I was a lot more concerned about this sort of thing back in 2012...

I periodically use the inbuilt back-up option in Blogger, which saves the entire thing as a largely incomprehensible xml file. I also use Google Take-Out as and when I remember, which creates a local copy of the blog in a semi-readable format. I did that yesterday so I'm currently covered to the extent of almost 16GB of archived blog history.

Having done all of that, though, I sometimes wonder what I'm doing it for, other than peace of mind? Just as I'm coming to realize I will almost certainly never go back and re-read the entire Discworld series in chronological order or make a list of my hundred favorite movies and watch them all again, two actual plans out of many I once made for my retirement, I very much doubt I'll ever go back and re-read my entire blog from start to finish, something I once thought of as a realistic (And sane!) possibility.

There are more than three thousand posts on Inventory Full. I write long, so the average post length is sure to be over a thousand words, probably quite a bit more. That's a minimum of three million words. Granted, that's only about thirty long novels, fewer than I'd read in an average year, but even so, I can't see myself sitting down to plow through it all.

I might, though. As I said, whims change. Present me might feel all clean and tidy for refusing to engage with digital hoarding but future me might curse him for being so slack. I know I shake my fist at the past me who threw away five Marvel Super-hero Pepsi cans twenty years ago, thinking it would be fine to keep just one as a representative sample. It taunts me even now.

It's probably better to err on the safe side, then, and keep everything but the follow-up question is this: if I'm mostly keeping those old blog posts as a hedge against my own potential future interest, do I really need to keep them as a working blog? I surely am not going to pretend posterity will be interested. Do they really need to be online?

I'm not part of the growing demographic that treats most mainstream service providers with a deep suspicion that verges on hostility. I like many of the big corporations, particularly Google and Amazon. They've done well by me for decades now. I don't see any particular reason why that should stop.

That said, I don't trust any of them. As some of us around here repeatedly point out, mostly in relation to game developers, companies are not your friends. 

Google in particular has a fickle history of faddiness. They come up with ideas, spin them into publicly available services, dote on them for a while, then drop them for the next exciting project. Sometimes, as with Google Reader or Google+, they shut them down for good. Other times, as with Blogger, they seem to enter into a period of benign neglect.

After Google Reader went offline, many of us have been expecting Blogger to be next. And still do. If Google isn't interested in maintaining a tool for reading blogs, why would it be any more keen on hosting them? But here Blogger still is and here may it long remain.

If it doesn't, though, I do at least trust Google to give me some notice before it vanishes into the great app graveyard in the cloud. They've done their due diligence with the previous closures, at least those I've been aware of, giving everyone time to migrate their data and re-home it, if technically feasible. 

Blogger might close this year or next but if it does, I'll deal with it when it happens. I'm sure we'll get a few months grace to sort everything out and move across to another platform.

The more interesting question is would I want to?  I'd certainly move to another platform and carry on blogging but whether I'd want to lug the last dozen years of content along with me is another matter. It might be nice to start clean. I'd lose the ability to link to old posts, sure, but if I'm honest I often find doing that a bit of a chore anyway and does anyone ever click through to read them? I know I don't ,when other people do it, or hardly ever.

So, perhaps I don't need a plan for backing up the blog as a blog. For peace of mind I'd like to know the raw data was stashed safely away so it could be reconstituted, even though I know I'd almost certainly never bother. I think Google's internal back-up systems cover that adequately already, always provided I remember to activate them.

In case I might ever reach that moment of senility satori where I want to relive my past for the sheer pleasure of it, though, I'd need the old blog to be available in a format I could browse with pleasure. Is there anything like that?

Plenty, as it happens. The aforementioned Take-Out files are theoretically viewable in the original format in a web browser although I haven't tried it. 

If I could be bothered, which I most definitely cannot, I could download every individual post, all 3000+ of them, as individual web pages and archive them locally and in the cloud. If I was a billionaire, I could even have the whole lot bound into a library's-worth of physical books.

The fastest, cheapest, most practical option I've found though is to have them converted to PDFs. You can do this yourself with the Adobe plug-in, if you put absolutely no value on your own time, but there are several websites that will do it for you, very quickly and not entirely inefficiently. 

As usual, there are both paid and free options. The free ones have many restrictions but I used one of them this morning and it certainly works.

The one I used was BlogBooker. I've used it before. I think I even blogged about it, although in a serendipitous confirmation of my lack of enthusiasm for my own blog as a resource, I can't now find any trace of it, even using Blogger's generally quite effective search function. 

The free version lets you make a PDF of up to a year of posts and you can do that three times every six months. There's also a 15 minute maximum processing time but I made "Books" for my content from the last three years this morning and it didn't come to 15 minutes in total.

The output looks nothing much like the blog and can be quite wonky, something I find endearing. I recommend taking the one post to a page option, which really tidies things up. 

The result is very comfortable to read and keeps all the illustrations and comments, albeit not in the same place you'd expect to find them. I was particularly impressed by the way it included a shot of every video as a static image. Obviously you can't click on them to make them play any more but it also retains all the hyperlinks, which it renders as annotated footnotes, so you can easily find and watch them again.

I like it. I might actually prefer reading my stuff there to reading it on the blog. If I can get my act together, I'm going to convert another three years of the blog every time my free six month allocation refreshes. That way I'll have the whole thing downloaded in a handy PDF format in a couple of years. Or I might even spring for the Basic plan at $18.90 and do the whole thing as one, massive PDF megabook.

One day, when I'm feeling flush, I might even stump up the cash to have some of my favorite posts printed up as a hardback, coffee-table book. It's expensive but it would make for a nice souvenir of my blogging career.

Of course, then I'd have to read through the whole 3,000 posts to decide what ought to go in it... and we're back where started!

Backing Up Your Blog: NBI

The Newbie Blogger Initiative has blown up into something a lot bigger than I expected. Probably than most of us expected. Apart from Syp, obviously. I haven't had time to round up all the new NBI blogs but Ardwulf has and thanks to his handy list I've now added all the new ones to my NBI blogroll.

Lots of more experienced bloggers have given great advice this month, while I've not been able to offer much more than encouragement. I did think of one useful thing that I've not seen anyone else mention, though.

Backing up your blog.

I use Blogger, which you'd imagine would be fairly robust. One day a few months after I started blogging I came home from work one evening, went to open my blog and it wasn't there. Google had "removed" it for "unauthorised activity". It was a nasty shock, as you might imagine.

I never did find out what the "unauthorized activity" was. I contacted Google and had to jump through various hoops to get my blog back including verification by mobile phone, which was awkward since I don't have a mobile phone. In the end my blog was restored in a few hours, but it left me concerned about what I could have lost.

The primary reason I write Inventory Full is to keep a diary of my MMO life for my own interest. I re-read my posts quite often and anticipate doing so for many years to come. I decided I no longer trusted Google to look after my data and determined to look after it myself.

Which brings me to HTTrack. It's a free website copier and offline website browser. It backs your website up onto your hard drive including all the pictures, links and so on. You can then browse your own blog (or any website you've backed up) without even needing an internet connection.

I know nothing about the people who make HTTrack, so consider using it at your own risk. There are other backup utilities you might prefer, they're easy enough to find with a quick google. I looked at a few and this was the one I chose. I've been using it for almost six months without any problems. It's simple to install and use and it does just what it's supposed to do.

I feel a lot happier with my data backed up on hard drive and burned to DVD. Chances are nothing will go wrong with the original copy over on Google's servers, but why take the risk when you don't have to? If you'd miss your own blog if it disappeared, back it up.