The Future of the QL Wiki

A place to discuss general QL issues.
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NormanDunbar
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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by NormanDunbar »

The images are fixed now. Text wrapping around images is working again and can be viewed to best effect on the History page at http://qlwiki.byethost7.com/doku/doku.p ... ki:history.

I forgot to mention this earlier.


Cheers,
Norm.


Why do they put lightning conductors on churches?
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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by NormanDunbar »

Rich said:
I am glad to see all of this positive progress with regards the QL Wiki - a permanent home still needs to be found for it however - whilst the current placeholder is fine, it needs to be easier to find with a simpler url.
While I agree that a permanent home, with a relevant url, would be a good thing, I think we have to face up to the fact that that would involve people paying out money. And we don't seem to like that sort of thing! I might be wrong of course.

Since you started this topic, nobody has come forward and said, "OK, let's do this thing. Let's start a non profit organisation, with a Web domain etc to host the wiki and the forums", so I think that a free hosting site, similar to the one currently up and running the test site, is the best we can hope for.

We could register sinclairworld.byethostN.com - N is a random digit - and have subdomains for free too, but for some reason, they wouldn't be qlwiki.sinclairworld. ... etc.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it won't happen, but so far, it's not looking that way. I appreciate the fact that you have coughed up the money for various webby things in the past, which is something I've only recently come to know,and I certainly appreciate it. It's why I contribute my time and effort to help out where and when I can. Thank you.

If nobody comes up with any suggestions as to the way forward, I can see the wiki current home becoming it's permanent home, after your deadline of January.


Cheers,
Norm.


Why do they put lightning conductors on churches?
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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by RWAP »

My concern over free (or cheap) hosting has been from bitter experience and I wonder how the hosting company makes its money?

From past experience this results in:
- The web hosting company inserting adverts alongside the content to try and get money for popular sites
- Restricting traffic to the site or sharing the hosting between 100s of websites making it very slow
- The web hosting company being bought up by an Israeli investment house, who then stop answering any support emails or updating the software
- The web hosting company simply turning off all access to the site - normally the backend whilst they try and find someone to buy the hosting company - meaning you can't easily download the files or database.

I have now had an offer from a member of the German ZX Team to take over the two forums - so that is good news - so we shall see what happens


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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by Dave »

I have in the past offered to host or pay for hosting of the site, and point wiki.sinclairql.com to it. I can chip in $100/year as my contribution.


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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by RWAP »

Just as one more thing - all of the images used by the QL Wiki will need to be moved from my server - so this will impact on the hosting side of things too. All of the pointers will then need to be updated.

Norman - can the upload of images into the dokuwiki site be automated in some way ?


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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by RWAP »

Dave wrote:I have in the past offered to host or pay for hosting of the site, and point wiki.sinclairql.com to it. I can chip in $100/year as my contribution.
wiki.sincliarql.com would be a great url to help people find it in search engines rather than the mess that is the QL Wikipedia pages.

Of course it would need to be set up properly so that all of the page urls use the wiki.sinclairql.com rather than it just being a simple alternative url to the home page.


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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by NormanDunbar »

Hi Rich,
RWAP wrote:JNorman - can the upload of images into the dokuwiki site be automated in some way ?
I've had a look, I had some playtime this afternoon, and found that there are 617 image links in the Wiki code. Of these, there are 612 unique images, 606 hosted on your site, and the rest found elsewhere. Sadly, all the COWO stuff no longer worked as the web site linked to is no more. However I found the missing 4 images and downloaded them too, so I now have a full set.

I adapted the "listWiki" utility to output a wget parameter file then "wgot" them all.

Some of the filenames were something.gif, however, it turned out that some of those gifs were jpegs and one was a bmp and the last, rwapbanner.gif, was actually rwapbanner.png. Linux complained when I tested all images to see if they worked or not. Once I fixed those by changing the gif extension to the correct one, all was well.

I've also uploaded them, all 612, to the 'qlwiki' name-space (for images) on the new Wiki and in doing so, I had 5 failures. It seems that BMP files are not permitted, so I converted eva_screenshot.bmp to jpeg. Also, the 4 files names *advert* simply refuse to upload. I renamed them to *ad* and they worked fine. Hmmm, interesting.

I now have all the images uploaded, corrected and working fine. I'll take a while next week and write some more code to convert the full URLs to the desired URL to load from the Wiki itself.

For my reference, this will be:

Code: Select all

{{:qlwiki:file_name.jpg?direct&size|Some explanatory text}}
With the desired alignment etc as appropriate.

So, I think - famous last words - that I have a complete collection of all the Wiki files and images present on the free host site. We shall see!

The images have been zipped up and added to my repository and I've pushed them to the SinclairQL repository as well. We should be both up to date.


Cheers,
Norm.


Why do they put lightning conductors on churches?
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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by RWAP »

XorA wrote:
I had offered these to Quanta along with the preservation folders on DropBox (as that is probably the best place for it), but have still not received any official offer for them. So feel free to contact me if anyone is interested in acquiring these.
archive.org has special permissions for storing preserved software, might be worth one of the preservation team investigating.
This would be a good idea, but my preservation efforts stopped in the middle of sorting the 1000s of titles, and so there is a hell of a lot of work still to be done by someone (and following all of the negative comments, the whole preservation team have understandably lost heart)...

a) Each preserved program is stored in q-emulator saved files in separate folders for each publisher / program - presumably this is not in a format suitable for uplaoding to archive.org and so each program would need zipping or converting to a disk image.
b) There are numerous programs which have not been tested and/or instances where they are copy protected so do not work under an emulator.
c) Many of the programs have several versions which need comparison to see which is a full version of the original software, or there are several versions of the same program which need comparing to see if they differ in any way and work out which might be the latest official version
d) A substantial percentage is most probably freeware or public domain and should be on Dilwyn's site already.

Once (a) to (d) are done, then the information needs comparison against Outsoft's own microdrive image preservation project to see if they are later or earlier versions, or if there is other software titles missing from either of the projects.

I also have a multitude of original manuals etc which ideally need to be scanned in for preservation and checked to see if we have the software to go with the manual (for example, I have the set of large manuals to some rare US design software which was sent over for review in the 1980s, but not the actual software!).

This ignores all of the work needed to try and find out the copyright status and/or obtain permission on the 1000+ titles, tracking down the large number of missing in action titles, adding information to the QL Wiki and more.

It needs a large dedicated team - unfortunately, those who are most interested in preserving the software will either (a) not be involved unless the software is made freely available to download no matter what the copyright status, or (b) not be involved because they were publicly admonished for trying to preserve the software previously.


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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by Dave »

I have a login, but not a URL of where to use it.


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Re: The Future of the QL Wiki

Post by NormanDunbar »

Phew!

The images have all been uploaded and I think I've got all the links corrected to use the uploaded images rather than the original web linked images. Time will tell!

I did notice a few links to images that are not yet present, around 6 - so I didn't do too badly - so I'll sort them out when I'm out from behind the firewall!

Cheers,
Norm.


Why do they put lightning conductors on churches?
Author of Arduino Software Internals
Author of Arduino Interrupts

No longer on Twitter, find me on https://mastodon.scot/@NormanDunbar.
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