Status – Page 461 – Chris Aldrich

Reply to Storify Bites the Dust. If You Have WordPress, You Don’t Need Another Third Party Clown Service

Replied to Storify Bites the Dust. If You Have WordPress, You Don't Need Another Third Party Clown Service by

How many more times do people have to get stiffed by a free web service that just bites the dust and leaves you bubkas? A monster post, some ranting on companies like Storify who offer free services that leverage our effort to get worth enough to get sold – when they do they just yank our content, an approach for local archiving your storify dying content, a new home spun tool for extracting all embeddable content links and how to use it to create your own archives in WordPress. Storify Is Nuking, for no credible reason, All Your Content Okay there are two kinds of people or organizations that create things for the web. One is looking to make money or fame and cares not what happens once they get either (or none and go back to flipping burgers). The other has an understanding and care for the history and future of the web, and makes every effort to make archived content live on, to not leave trails of dead links.

I like Alan Levine’s take on type one and type two silo services. Adobe/Storify definitely seems to be doing things the wrong way for shutting down a service. He does a great job of laying out some thought on how to create collection posts, particularly on WordPress, though I suspect the user interface could easily be recreated on other platforms.

I would add some caution to some of his methods as he suggests using WordPress’s embed capabilities by using raw URLs to services like Twitter. While this can be a reasonable short term solution and the output looks nice, if the original tweet or content at that URL is deleted (or Twitter shuts down and 86s it the same way Storify has just done), then you’re out of luck again!

Better than relying on the auto-embed handled by WordPress, actually copy the entire embed from Twitter to capture the text and content from the original.

There’s a big difference in the following two pieces of data:

https://twitter.com/judell/status/940973536675471360

and

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"> <p dir="ltr" lang="en">I hope <a href="https://twitter.com/Storify?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@storify</a> will follow the example set by <a href="https://twitter.com/dougkaye?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@dougkaye</a> when he shut down ITConversations: <a href="https://t.co/oBTWmR5M3A">https://t.co/oBTWmR5M3A</a>.</p> My shows there are now preserved (<a href="https://t.co/IuIUMvMXi3">https://t.co/IuIUMvMXi3</a>) in a way that none of my magazine writing was. — Jon Udell (@judell) <a href="https://twitter.com/judell/status/940973536675471360?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 13, 2017</a> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8">

While WordPress ostensibly displays them the same, one will work as long as Twitter lives, and the other lives as long as your own site lives and actually maintains the original content.

Now there are certainly bigger issues for saving video content this way from places like YouTube given copyright issues as well as bandwidth and other technical concerns. In these cases, perhaps embedding the URLs only within WordPress is the way to go. But keep in mind what it is you’re actually copying/archiving when you use the method he discusses.

Incidentally, I use both Broken Link Checker and Post Archival in the Internet Archive plugins to save a copy of content as well as to help fix broken links on my site when services or sites go down unexpectedly.

Those who are interested in better saving/archiving their content might appreciate the following links/resources:

Side note: I prefer the closer Yiddish spelling of bupkis. It is however a great term for what you often end up receiving from social silos that provide you with services that you can usually pretty easily maintain yourself.

Checkin Smart & Final

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Let’s get ready to bake some cookies!

📖 Read pages 19-52 of The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life by Nick Lane

📖 Read Chapter 1: What is Life? pages 19-52 in The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life by Nick Lane (W.W. Norton,
2015, ISBN: 978-0393088816)

Lane lays out a “brief” history of the 4 billion years of life on Earth. Discusses isotopic fractionation and other evidence that essentially shows a bottleneck between bacteria and archaea (procaryotes) on the one hand and eucaryotes on the other, the latter of which all must have had a single common ancestor based on the genetic profiles we currently see. He suggest that while we should see even more diversity of complex life, we do not, and he hints at the end of the chapter that the reason is energy.

In general, it’s much easier to follow than I anticipated it might be. His writing style is lucid and fluid and he has some lovely prose not often seen in books of this sort. It’s quite a pleasure to read. Additionally he’s doing a very solid job of building an argument in small steps.

I’m watching closely how he’s repeatedly using the word information in his descriptions, and it seems to be a much more universal and colloquial version than the more technical version, but something interesting may come out of it from my philosophical leanings. I can’t wait to get further into the book to see how things develop.