The Internet Archive just announced a no-waitlist book lending due to COVID-19, I'd guess their servers might not be too happy about the inrush of users.

http://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-eme...

Right, and https://archive.org/details/nationalemergencylibrary is up and responsive.

So I'm guessing that they've shifted resources.

Now would be a great time to donate to the Internet Archive if you're able to. They can surely use the help.

Don't they generate any income?

If only shareholders would think the same way about PG&E and other companies that could use infrastructure upgrades ...

PG&E is so far behind on deferred maintenance that people have been petitioning for California to socialize it so the state stops catching on fire from high tension powerlines.

You will be glad to know that they've protected executive bonuses, though.

Didn't PG&E get blocked from performing upgrades by the state utilities commission? Something about not wanting to increase power customer bills... utility incentives are not easy.

FYI: downvotes because (0) off-topic, (a) not constructive, (b) the world is bigger than California and there’s a lot of great infrastructure elsewhere, (c) PG&E is probably about average, (d) complaining about downvotes without thinking about why people had reason to downvote you.

Downvoted you only because PG&E is way worse than average. Just yesterday they agreed to plead guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter, and I could go on and on about their wrongdoing. Much related to not doing maintenance and then falsifying maintenance reports. I moved out of their service area a decade ago, still hate them.

All other points are fair, though.

I'm glad that you are out of their service area we need more people like you

In the meantime, distributed archiving ftw, run your own archives with Webrecorder.io, ArchiveBox.io, SingleFile, kiwix.org, etc!

The kiwix Wikipedia-en full scrape with images has been broken for over 18 months, I think they could use some technical help. I tried running their scraper myself on a nice AWS instance and it just stalls after many days of downloading articles. Could probably use a rewrite. ;)

https://sourceforge.net/p/kiwix/discussion/604121/thread/1f2...

https://github.com/openzim/mwoffliner/issues/1020

https://github.com/openzim/mwoffliner

The whole zim file infrastructure is pretty broken. I've been trying to put together a system for generating a WARC file by rendering all the wikitext content in a database dump, which is a lot more reasonable of an approach.

Rendering wikitext is challenging though, since wikitext can include chunks of other wikitext, and wikitext can use some pretty complicated templating functionality.

Oddly enough where I've run into the biggest issues is in weird slowdowns of the python WARCIO library that making dealing with large archives just about impossible. I haven't had time to really track that down, but if anyone want to it's pretty easy to reproduce, just try adding a few million lorum-ipsum articles and look at how far from linear time it's running.

There are a lot of advantages to starting from a dump, you can provide much better tools for filtering articles, probably even provide rudimentary document classification. You can also do things like re-compress and minify images, a dump intended for a cellphone probably doesn't need 4k images.

WARC is also probably a better tool for distributing web-archive type content, like wikipedia dumps. You can distribute a package of text content and image content as separate files, for example. Generally I have not been very impressed with the quality of ZIM file tooling. One disadvantage is you need to provide separate search indexing, but that's doable.

I'd love to be able to get a wikimedia grant to work on this, and take on less contract work, but so far their grant process is pretty hard to follow.

I'm actually currently working on the ZIM toolchain for Kiwix on a contract basis, so I'd be interested to hear more about your pain points, they might be something I can help out with.

In general, I'd say that ZIM and WARC are not really direct competitors or solutions to the same problems, they're really for distinct use-cases. ZIM is a highly-compressed format that's designed solely for static articles and flat content, it doesn't really store headers or anything else that WARC does in order to support full request/response replaying. ZIM is optimized for storing thousands to millions of pages of homogenous content, WARC is optimized for high-fidelity collections of smaller amounts of content.

If you want to help out with our efforts, feel free to DM me on Twitter @theSquashSH or reply here and I can introduce you to the ZIM people (who get grants to improve this process on the regular, and are open to hiring contract workers).

This sounds like a really cool project, maybe someone from Wikimedia will be willing to help you figure out the process. I'll try to dig up the right contacts for you.

You could start by asking here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:Project

I'm not sure what your use case is so maybe this isn't helpful, but Wikipedia has weekly or so database dumps that you can download, as well as static HTML (although that might be more out of date)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

Kiwix has a mobile app that runs a local copy of full Wikipedia (~80GB) from the device, with formatting and pictures and everything. I'm not aware of any other fully-baked solution that does this.

It looks like the pictures are not available as a dump from Wikimedia; the page you link to implies that they are, but the latest dump is from 2012.

I'm actually helping work on that right now, we're improving the node-libzim bindings that mwoffliner uses to write the ZIM files, and providing some additional server power to do larger archives and hopefully catch up on the backlog of wikipedia-en dumps.

Is there a tool that downloads every website I visit locally and then, upon revisit, shows me my local copy for instant load, but does a diff in the background with the online version and asks me to show newer version only if there are differences?

Try https://github.com/WorldBrain/Memex, it has annotation and lets you review previously seen versions of a site as you're browsing.

Or check out some of the other options here:

- https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Comm...

- https://github.com/iipc/awesome-web-archiving

I sent them a bug yesterday where I was being blocked for "Too Many Requests" regarding an endpoint I wasn't actually using (they thought I was attempting to submit URLs using the "Save Page Now" feature), so they've been having issues across the board.

This is good though, as they're now hopefully aware of some previously unknown deficiencies.

Best of luck to the Archive team to get things up and running again with minimal stress!

That would explain the random issues I saw recently (within the past ~12 hours) where I asked for a page version from 2019 and got one from 2018.

It's been down for a few weeks for cnn.com (Can't load feb 1st to current day). I wonder if they're getting pressure from somewhere. Check it out for yourself.

Massive layoffs today I heard.

Any kinks would be appreciated.

I think you may have had a Freudian slip ;)

Indeed! Kinks still welcome. (was going to make a joke about fat-fingering, butt decided to let it lay).

Source?

I don't believe GP means at Archive.org. But there are a number of companies letting people go.

I definitely mean at Archive.org. No links yet.