Dublin Opinion

A couple of weekends back we started off changing the style of Dublin Opinion and ended up crashing the entire site. It took Donagh the best part of a day to get it working again. During that time, we both sat and looked at a year’s work vanish before our very eyes, with occasional flashes from Google cache to remind us, like Clementis‘ hat on Gottwald’s head, that we once existed.

This being the internet, this has happened before to someone else, and someone else has come up with a solution. Not only that, they’ve made it available for free. Yesterday I downloaded Webaroo and used it to save the entire Dublin Opinion site - embedded media and all - onto my laptop. Webaroo allows users to download sections of the Web onto their hardrive for future reference. However, please note, it is not a back-up service for your server. It copies, but it’s one-way. In order to make that copy, it uses patented compression software. The price of hardrive storage is falling by the day, and the creators reckon it will not be long until the Web itself is available as a hardrive. They reckon they could compress what they classify as “the essential web” into about 40GB.

That sounds like an awful lot of ads and promotions to me. (I mean, once the porn is filtered out, along with ‘when monkeys go bad’, is there even 40GB of readable/watchable content on the web?) Nonetheless, the software allows us bloggers to preserve these vanity projects in the manner most fitting their creation: pushed away into a dark corner of our data storage drives for our children to say, in ten years’ time, “what’s this, Daddy?”