6 ms·

This whole thread is giving me feels, but to the basics, I'll tell you how it happened. I'd been writing about what we came to call social media since the earl

This whole thread is giving me feels, but to the basics, I'll tell you how it happened. I'd been writing about what we came to call social media since the early 90s (alt.culture.usenet and alt.folklore.urban ftw), but by the middle of last decade, all anyone wanted to talk to me about was marketing on Facebook, which was the boringest possible topic. At the same time, my wordpress host had lousy security, and my site was getting frequently disabled because of some malicious javascript uploaded through some hole they hand't patched. I wasn't writing there anymore, so it was pure cost at that point, and cost of my time, not just dollars. Then I moved to Shanghai for several years, working on other stuff, and fixed the site a couple of times again, and one time, my host was like "We disabled your site!" because of their own security flaws had let it get hacked again, which, the whole thing had entered 'ugh field'territory. I never decided to let the site lapse, I was just tired of dealing with it, and the political circumstances in both China and the U.S. seemed much more urgent than rescuing some historical essays, so one day at a time of not dealing with it became years. And here we are, me reading my own eulogy. Which is incredibly flattering and touching, I have to say. I'm not even sure what of it can be resuscitated -- maybe if I want it back, I'll have to copy it from Wayback (and will say "Thank you Brewster", not for the first time), but if anyone here has advice about competent and secure hosting for an old Wordpress blog, hmu at cshirky@gmail.com, because reading this, it makes me embarassed not to have just fucking fixed this a year or two ago. And thanks, all, for this thread. -clay

lathiat 4y ago
You’ll never maintain a Wordpress site long term securely. Need to convert it to static html one way or another.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  10y of http://egypt.urnash.com http://egypt.urnash.com running on Wordpress with a small set of plugins, including one for security, says otherwise.
- karjaluoto 4y ago
  Another approach might be to toss it on blot.im. (I’m in no way affiliated with Blot, but I like how simple the product is.)
- wolrah 4y ago
  > You’ll never maintain a Wordpress site long term securely. Need to convert it to static html one way or another. I'm in favor of static HTML myself where possible, but it's not hard to maintain a secure Wordpress install. Keep automatic updates enabled and don't install any third party plugins. It's that second part that most people screw themselves with.
  - rob74 4y ago
    It may not be very hard to maintain, but you still have to maintain it. Whereas if you just have a collection of articles that you want to keep around as an archive, if you convert them to a static site, you can basically forget about them afterward...
    - wolrah 4y ago
      > It may not be very hard to maintain, but you still have to maintain it. When the maintenance is "ensure auto updates are on, and don't do anything that would not get updated automatically" it's not like it requires regular effort. > Whereas if you just have a collection of articles that you want to keep around as an archive, if you convert them to a static site, you can basically forget about them afterward... Your web server, your operating system, etc. still require at bare minimum the same level of maintenance. You can outsource that maintenance to someone else of course, but you can do the same with WP as well. -- My point is that WP alone doesn't massively increase the maintenance burden, it's what people tend to do with (to?) WP that increases the burden and eventually leads to unmaintained sites.
      - DonHopkins 4y ago
        >it's not like it requires regular effort More effort that you'll be able to exert when you're dead.
        davidandgoliath 4y ago
        I assure you it'd be a whole lot easier for your survivors to manage a WP install than it would be to figure out your Jekyll configs.
- dannyobrien 4y ago
  WP security has come a long way. I've had a site up for over a decade, and while I used to be VERY nervous, now with automatic updates and a fair amount of code-hardening, it really hasn't been a problem.
- Fnoord 4y ago
  Wordpress itself is reasonably secure nowadays. It is the plugins which are a mess.
cossatot 4y ago
If it's just a collection of essays, what about a static site? You can set one up on Github Pages or Gitlab Pages with a minimum of coding. There are also virtually no security concerns and maintenance is minimal. You'd have to take all of the text from the Wordpress blog and format it into Markdown but that shouldn't take a huge amount of time unless there is a lot of weird formatting or different media types.
- cxr 4y ago
  > You'd have to take all of the text from the Wordpress blog and format it into Markdown No you wouldn't. Just dump it in as-is.
  - notRobot 4y ago
    Indeed. GitHub Pages can serve HTML just fine.
- philipps 4y ago
  This is absolutely the easiest solution. We did this for open.media.mit.edu in order to archive the old wordpress site. Used wget to fetch all of the HTML and ran a script over it to remove some obvious clutter. Happy to help out. Your writing really shaped the way I thought about the potential of an open internet.
JPKab 4y ago
Clay, Just want to thank you for your great work. I used to work on a lot of US Department of Defense projects, mostly stuff I can't talk about. One very notable project I CAN talk about was an initiative (pushed by utterly clueless, insular, and frankly corrupt academics) to spend billions of dollars in 2008-2010 timeframe on implementing Semantic Web technologies in various military business systems across the DoD. As an actual technologist who knew how to build things, I was perpetually in the awful position of having to explain to leadership that these highly credentialed academics were selling garbage. I had tried to implement systems according to their design. The graph databases they pushed (they hated Neo4J, for reasons of purity because it didn't actually use RDF/OWL in the database...... i get a headache just talking about this...) were slow piles of dogshit that couldn't scale. No amount of reality could dissuade the academics. They had their theories, and any collision with reality was merely an implementation detail that I and my team were simply too incompetent to overcome in their eyes. Almost none of them had actual technical experience. A smattering of Comp Sci folks, and a ton of "Library Science" idiots. Your essays on why the SemWeb was utter bullshit were a potent weapon I used with the generals the academics were pushing, and I eventually got the generals funding the project to see the light. Got them cancelled, and sent the idiot egg-heads packing. I still see them on LinkedIn to this day. They desperately continue trying to push that rock up the hill, and only recently warmed to more practical graph database solutions. They HATED YOU. It was hilarious, watching them try to refute your obvious points and clear writing with jargon and hand-waving. Utterly unconvincing to the generals. Thanks for your essays saving my ass back then!
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Great story this. The difference between theory and practice has sunk many, many billions.
- Kye 4y ago
  Library Science is what librarians learn. It's a real thing for a real job. Like most credentials and like most jobs, some people try to over-fit experience and knowledge in one field to another. You see the same with CompSci/tech people treating data like there's no bias in its collection.
mdavidn 4y ago
You could scrape the site, either from Wayback or from WordPress, if you manage to get it working just briefly, and then host the site statically out of an S3 bucket. wget has an option to recursively crawl and save a site, but there are other tools. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/WebsiteHosting.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/Websit...
teddyh 4y ago
If you don’t want to talk about marketing on Facebook, letting your own web site lapse and disappear seems like the last thing that you’d want to do. (See https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people_2021 https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people_2021)
DoreenMichele 4y ago
I only know of you because of The Shirky Principle, which was very valuable to me in figuring out what's wrong with homeless services and that we need to focus on fixing housing instead. Thank you for your work and for stopping by to respond here. Good luck with restoring your site.
derefr 4y ago
> competent and secure hosting for an old Wordpress blog Amusingly, nobody here has stated the obvious: wordpress.com.
akavel 4y ago
Try to take a look at wpengine.com; they're not the cheapest, but I heard they have very good support people, and via some business relations I had with them, I know they have a system for auto-updating wordpress plugins.
epeus 4y ago
Hi Clay, Kevin Marks here. I an help you scrape it out of wordpress into a static site if you like, I've done similar for Dan Gilmor and other old bloggers. Ping me - kevinmarks@gmail.com
jacquesm 4y ago
What strikes me is how timeless your writing is. My own stuff is hit-and-miss, the bulk of it has a best before date measured in a few weeks or months but yours is just as relevant today as when you wrote it and that takes some real talent, not just in writing but also in the depth of insight that you have on this things. Thank you for all of it!

lathiat 4y ago

You’ll never maintain a Wordpress site long term securely. Need to convert it to static html one way or another.

egypturnash 4y ago
10y of http://egypt.urnash.com http://egypt.urnash.com running on Wordpress with a small set of plugins, including one for security, says otherwise.
karjaluoto 4y ago
Another approach might be to toss it on blot.im. (I’m in no way affiliated with Blot, but I like how simple the product is.)
wolrah 4y ago
> You’ll never maintain a Wordpress site long term securely. Need to convert it to static html one way or another. I'm in favor of static HTML myself where possible, but it's not hard to maintain a secure Wordpress install. Keep automatic updates enabled and don't install any third party plugins. It's that second part that most people screw themselves with.
- rob74 4y ago
  It may not be very hard to maintain, but you still have to maintain it. Whereas if you just have a collection of articles that you want to keep around as an archive, if you convert them to a static site, you can basically forget about them afterward...
  - wolrah 4y ago
    > It may not be very hard to maintain, but you still have to maintain it. When the maintenance is "ensure auto updates are on, and don't do anything that would not get updated automatically" it's not like it requires regular effort. > Whereas if you just have a collection of articles that you want to keep around as an archive, if you convert them to a static site, you can basically forget about them afterward... Your web server, your operating system, etc. still require at bare minimum the same level of maintenance. You can outsource that maintenance to someone else of course, but you can do the same with WP as well. -- My point is that WP alone doesn't massively increase the maintenance burden, it's what people tend to do with (to?) WP that increases the burden and eventually leads to unmaintained sites.
    - DonHopkins 4y ago
      >it's not like it requires regular effort More effort that you'll be able to exert when you're dead.
      - davidandgoliath 4y ago
        I assure you it'd be a whole lot easier for your survivors to manage a WP install than it would be to figure out your Jekyll configs.
dannyobrien 4y ago
WP security has come a long way. I've had a site up for over a decade, and while I used to be VERY nervous, now with automatic updates and a fair amount of code-hardening, it really hasn't been a problem.
Fnoord 4y ago
Wordpress itself is reasonably secure nowadays. It is the plugins which are a mess.

cossatot 4y ago

If it's just a collection of essays, what about a static site? You can set one up on Github Pages or Gitlab Pages with a minimum of coding. There are also virtually no security concerns and maintenance is minimal. You'd have to take all of the text from the Wordpress blog and format it into Markdown but that shouldn't take a huge amount of time unless there is a lot of weird formatting or different media types.

cxr 4y ago
> You'd have to take all of the text from the Wordpress blog and format it into Markdown No you wouldn't. Just dump it in as-is.
- notRobot 4y ago
  Indeed. GitHub Pages can serve HTML just fine.
philipps 4y ago
This is absolutely the easiest solution. We did this for open.media.mit.edu in order to archive the old wordpress site. Used wget to fetch all of the HTML and ran a script over it to remove some obvious clutter. Happy to help out. Your writing really shaped the way I thought about the potential of an open internet.

JPKab 4y ago

Clay, Just want to thank you for your great work. I used to work on a lot of US Department of Defense projects, mostly stuff I can't talk about. One very notable project I CAN talk about was an initiative (pushed by utterly clueless, insular, and frankly corrupt academics) to spend billions of dollars in 2008-2010 timeframe on implementing Semantic Web technologies in various military business systems across the DoD. As an actual technologist who knew how to build things, I was perpetually in the awful position of having to explain to leadership that these highly credentialed academics were selling garbage. I had tried to implement systems according to their design. The graph databases they pushed (they hated Neo4J, for reasons of purity because it didn't actually use RDF/OWL in the database...... i get a headache just talking about this...) were slow piles of dogshit that couldn't scale. No amount of reality could dissuade the academics. They had their theories, and any collision with reality was merely an implementation detail that I and my team were simply too incompetent to overcome in their eyes. Almost none of them had actual technical experience. A smattering of Comp Sci folks, and a ton of "Library Science" idiots. Your essays on why the SemWeb was utter bullshit were a potent weapon I used with the generals the academics were pushing, and I eventually got the generals funding the project to see the light. Got them cancelled, and sent the idiot egg-heads packing. I still see them on LinkedIn to this day. They desperately continue trying to push that rock up the hill, and only recently warmed to more practical graph database solutions. They HATED YOU. It was hilarious, watching them try to refute your obvious points and clear writing with jargon and hand-waving. Utterly unconvincing to the generals. Thanks for your essays saving my ass back then!

jacquesm 4y ago
Great story this. The difference between theory and practice has sunk many, many billions.
Kye 4y ago
Library Science is what librarians learn. It's a real thing for a real job. Like most credentials and like most jobs, some people try to over-fit experience and knowledge in one field to another. You see the same with CompSci/tech people treating data like there's no bias in its collection.

mdavidn 4y ago

You could scrape the site, either from Wayback or from WordPress, if you manage to get it working just briefly, and then host the site statically out of an S3 bucket. wget has an option to recursively crawl and save a site, but there are other tools. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/WebsiteHosting.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/Websit...

teddyh 4y ago

If you don’t want to talk about marketing on Facebook, letting your own web site lapse and disappear seems like the last thing that you’d want to do. (See https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people_2021 https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people_2021)

DoreenMichele 4y ago

I only know of you because of The Shirky Principle, which was very valuable to me in figuring out what's wrong with homeless services and that we need to focus on fixing housing instead. Thank you for your work and for stopping by to respond here. Good luck with restoring your site.

derefr 4y ago

> competent and secure hosting for an old Wordpress blog Amusingly, nobody here has stated the obvious: wordpress.com.

akavel 4y ago

Try to take a look at wpengine.com; they're not the cheapest, but I heard they have very good support people, and via some business relations I had with them, I know they have a system for auto-updating wordpress plugins.

epeus 4y ago

Hi Clay, Kevin Marks here. I an help you scrape it out of wordpress into a static site if you like, I've done similar for Dan Gilmor and other old bloggers. Ping me - kevinmarks@gmail.com

jacquesm 4y ago

What strikes me is how timeless your writing is. My own stuff is hit-and-miss, the bulk of it has a best before date measured in a few weeks or months but yours is just as relevant today as when you wrote it and that takes some real talent, not just in writing but also in the depth of insight that you have on this things. Thank you for all of it!