Catallaxy Files

Now that Catallaxy Files seems to have settled in at the new server, I thought I’d bring you all up to speed on what has changed “under the hood” and what is yet to be done.

The New Sever

First off, the site is now on a server shared with andrewnorton.info and skepticlawyer.com.au. It’s a “Mu” installation; the upshot of this is that user accounts are shared between these sites. If you’re logged in at one, you’re logged in at all three.

Secondly, there’s an improved backup plan in place. The upshot is that the database and files for all these sites are backed up every night. Should disaster strike ever again, it should be much easier to recover from. Club Troppo is backing up in the same fashion (though from a different server).

Thirdly, I’ve filled one common request and installed the WPTouch plugin. This means that those of you reading Catallaxy (or Andrew Norton, or Skepticlawyer) on mobile phones will get a different version of the site customised for small screens.

The Recovery Effort

As you all know, the archives of the site were basically lost or corrupted when the previous server was turned off. On and off I have been working on this problem for the last few weeks.

Although the database and the files are gone, I have been trying to reconstruct them from archives and caches. For instance, Catallaxy is archived annually in October by the National Library in the PANDORA archive. Also, Catallaxy is cached by search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

I have basically recovered as much material from these as possible (several thousand files worth). A lot of it isn’t directly usable, but it may be possible to recover hundreds of stories, including comments.

It’s slow going, however. Filtering, massaging, converting and importing the data is very fiddly due to inconsistencies, missing entries and so on. So don’t hold your breath — it will happen, but not right away.

In the meantime you can download the work and play with it yourself, as I have pushed my work-in-progress into a public repository on github.