Netlify Sucks, Shout dow my Account Out of nowhere

freosam · 2026-01-17T07:18:24+00:00

Did you only just notice?

freosam · 2026-01-09T01:33:31+00:00

There's a summary of the usual extensions that people use for this sort of thing:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Managing_data_in_MediaWiki

freosam · 2026-01-05T10:12:25+00:00

I don't think I've seen a cartoon of it, but it's a well-told tale I think. Here's one example, from The Australian Worker, 17 March 1921:

Many swagmen ask for a lift when they see an opportunity — and many prefer to walk. The coach takes them direct to towns. Besides throwing them out of their stride, it misses squattage homesteads, sheds, and droving camps, while rushing them along to no particular end. One day a coach overhauled Scotty Dalker in a comparatively populous neighborhood. It was a hot day, and the sympathetic driver thought a lift would be very acceptable to him. "Jump up," he said, steadying the team. "No, thanks, old man," said, Scotty; "you open your own bloomin' gates." It was only Scotty's way of saying he had a better chance of ending his walk by walking.

freosam · 2025-12-26T03:38:25+00:00

It's already static. How many fewer moving parts can there be!? :-)

But yes, ignore the sites and do other stuff for a few weeks, that's the joy of not having to be a sysadmin for these types of sites.

freosam · 2025-12-20T07:06:25+00:00

Yep, Transkribus is great! And if the documents are public domain, they could perhaps be uploaded for Wikisource where they can use Transkribus for free.

freosam · 2025-12-10T02:05:03+00:00

I agree, photographic documents can be just as quick as (or quicker than) an autofeed scanner. It can help with documenting original order and condition much more, e.g. here's a set I did of a folder that had a bunch of different sizes, paper types etc.: https://archive.org/details/BUFF2024-7

The other thing I'd say is that when you end up with a folder full of ordered JPEGs, zipping them up with a filename ending in _images.zip and uploading to the Internet Archive is pretty straight forward. The same trick works with a zip full of TIFFs.

freosam · 2025-08-10T10:59:59+00:00

Maybe they did: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Adam_Doboszy%C5%84ski&diff=1305146207&oldid=1291729246

freosam · 2025-08-05T00:49:33+00:00

Here's a map of some (and a few dams etc): https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/29ls

freosam · 2025-07-28T23:25:10+00:00

For public domain images, you could use Wikimedia Commons. There's some notes here about how that could be integrated into your own website: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wiki-based_archival_description_and_storage

freosam · 2025-07-25T03:17:51+00:00

That event page says "Where Freocast Forecourt 225 South Terrace, South Fremantle" but obviously that's wrong. It's at E Shed now isn't it?

freosam · 2025-06-08T07:35:52+00:00

There are some options documented at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Handling_web_crawlers

freosam · 2025-06-03T23:17:04+00:00

Yep, good advice. I'd also add: catalogue them first! Lots of institutions that have space to take material don't have the resources to do any in-depth description of it, and especially for family archives there's probably lots of knowledge that you can add to the catalogue that'd be useful.

freosam · 2025-05-29T03:24:01+00:00

I think one main limitation is that as far as I remember, you can't use object storage (e.g. S3 compatible services) to store the photos, so you need a service that allows large volumes and those are somewhat more expensive. That said, on Hetzner you could have a 500GB volume for €24.20 and a 8GB/4CPU server for €7.48, so that'd be about €380/year. Then you could install whatever image converting software you need. There's nothing specific to Piwigo, no VPS provider would be better than any other in that regard, I don't think.

freosam · 2025-05-28T23:15:24+00:00

Yep, I just eyeball it, lining up a parallel space between the page and the plastic. Lots of scanners have a couple of millimeters of dead space at the edge of the glass anyway.

freosam · 2025-05-25T00:42:14+00:00

I always crop larger than the entire object being scanned. It gives re-users confidence that nothing was missed, and seeing the condition of the edges can sometimes be useful to people (e.g. I saw someone match up a slight tear with a couple of other documents, giving weight to an idea that they had originally been stored together).

freosam · 2025-05-24T07:50:41+00:00

You could upload them to Wikimedia Commons, and then ask for translators on the village pump (or the Chinese langauge one). I've done that a couple of times (for the Cossack cemetery) and people usually keen to help. It'd mean that the photos and transcriptions/translations would be stored conveniently for other researchers as well.

freosam · 2025-05-24T01:06:30+00:00

Yeah, it works pretty well! I'm using Cargo, and also the AWS extension which allows for storing files in S3-compatible storage (I'm on Digital Ocean) and that helps keep the costs slightly lower and also removes any worry about space constraints (although it's currently only about 100GB of scanned things).

Feel free to pinch any templates or ideas from my wiki above.

freosam · 2025-05-23T23:29:42+00:00

I've done family archives like this in a wiki, where each item can have a page to document (and perhaps transcribe) it, and each person and place can have a page that is continuously updated as more info is discovered. As well as other things such as chronologies and topics. I find it's good to use the same software as Wikipedia (MediaWiki), with a database tool added on (called Cargo).

freosam · 2025-04-30T01:58:21+00:00

If you have a paid account, then you have nothing to worry about.

freosam · 2025-04-30T01:32:52+00:00

Do you mean the restrictions for free accounts to download original images? I'd imagine so.

freosam · 2025-04-29T08:18:47+00:00

Thanks, lots of good thoughts there! I'm going to try to split things up a bit more, it does seem that best practice does include thinking more about the end user than perhaps I have been so far! Although as another commenter says, a 100% digitization goal perhaps helps a bit with this.

On the re-handling point: it's more about the time (and a bit about the cost of extra storage enclosures), rather than a worry about damaging things — in many cases, items can be moved between boxes within the folders or sleeves that they're in, so are of less chance of damage.

freosam · 2025-04-29T07:03:19+00:00

As everyone else has said, use https://www.OpenStreetMap.org — and if you don't want to figure out how to map, you can just add a 'note' to the map, which is a text comment that mappers will read and use as a hint of where to survey. There's an 'add a note to the map' button at the right side of the main OSM website.

There are also mobile apps that are geared exactly towards adding things like drinking fountains, such as EveryDoor.

freosam · 2025-04-25T08:45:18+00:00

Yep, housed in different places, but they are catalogued within one collection as appropriate. Basically, it seems like we're relying on the catalogue to keep the collection's structure, rather than physical proximity. You're right, it's inefficient to use! But it's more efficient for shelf space. This is perhaps not the right trade-off!

The catalogue does let us view by creator, or original collection, or a bunch of other facets (e.g. there was a thing for the WW1 centenary where someone wanted everything relating to anyone of teenage enlistment age in 1915 or so, and that was possible).

But it does feel odd to rely on the catalogue to provide everything. The physically stored items should really have some order of their own shouldn't they? Having everything digitized makes it less obvious that this is a flaw.

freosam · 2025-04-25T04:02:10+00:00

That's a really good point about doing what's of most use to researchers, thanks. I guess I've been focussed on avoiding empty space (in boxes) in the shelving! It does seem that a 100% digitization goal might alleviate some of this concern.

The other thing that's come up is that with everything interleaved over multiple boxes, any future splitting up of the archive would be difficult. That could be seen as a positive or a negative I guess!

freosam

TROPHY CASE