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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • So many things!

    We moved to a new house a couple of years ago and I mapped out the whole property, put it into LibreCAD, designed the space, and have been planting/building it since then. I now have thousands of plants, over 1000 unique types, and a vegetable garden in our 1/3 acre lot. I’m very proud of it, but don’t really know how to best share it with the world (or if anyone cares).

    I also have a web site that I’ve been building forever, lots of little programs, things like my irrigation system built from a Raspberry Pi, my homelab, all of the plants that I start from seed in the spring for the garden (thousands under grow lights with heated mats), the hydroponic system… I’m sure there’s more.


  • I started a created a company in 1995 to do web stuff for a very niche market – I guess now it would be called SaaS. It never really completed or became a money-maker, but it’s out there and I still work on it.

    First I had problems with IP theft – I had lots of original photos that people took. Then datasets and articles I had written were copied, so I focused on trying to stop that. Then I found myself spending too much time trying to deal with SEO, then x, then y… It was always a game of wackamole, trying to figure out how to keep ahead.

    Throw in the ebb and flow of life’s challenges and it always seems like time, money, health, or some combination thereof seemed to come up at just the wrong time (is there ever a good time?)

    I’m still plugging away. It’s thirty years later and I’ve retired from my 9-5, so hopefully I can make some real progress.











  • I’m thinking about it from the perspective of an artist or creator under existing copyright law. You can’t just take someone’s work and republish it.

    It’s not allowed with books, it’s not allowed with music, and it’s not even allowed with public sculpture. If a sculpture shows up in a movie scene, they need the artist’s permission and may have to pay a licensing fee.

    Why should the creation of text on the internet have lesser protections?

    But copyright law is deeply rooted in damages, and if advertising revenue is lost that’s a very real example.

    And I have recourse; I used it. I used current law (DMCA) to remove over 1,000,000 pages because it was my legal right to remove infringing content. If it had been legal, they wouldn’t have had to remove it.




  • It’s user-driven. Nothing would get archived in this case. And what if the content changes but the page remains up? What then? Fairly sure this is why Wikipedia uses archives.

    That’s a good point.

    Pretty sure mainstream ad blockers won’t block a custom in-house banner. And if it has no tracking, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s on Archive or not, you’re getting paid the same, no?

    Some of them do block those kinds of ads – I’ve tried it out with a few. If it’s at archive.org I lose the ability to report back to the sponsor that their ad was viewed ‘n’ times (unless, ironically, if I put a tracker in). It also means that if sponsorship changes, the main drivers of traffic like Wikipedia may not see that. It makes getting new sponsors more difficult because they want something timely for seasonal ads. Imagine sponsoring a page, but Wikipedia only links to the archived one. Your ad for gardening tools isn’t reflected by one of the larger drivers of traffic until December, and nobody wants to buy gardening tools in December.

    Yes, I could submit pages to archive.org as sponsorship changes if this model continues.

    It was a much bigger deal when we used Google ads a decade ago, but we stopped in early 2018 because tracking was getting out of hand.

    If I was submitting pages myself I’d be all for it because I could control when it happened. But there have times when I’ve edited a page and totally screwed it up, and archive.org just happened to grab it at that moment when the formatting was all weird or the wrong picture was loaded. I usually fix the page and forget about it until I see it on archive.org later.

    I asked for pages like that to be removed, but archive.org was unresponsive until I used a DMCA takedown notice.