I always did this as a kid on the beaches of Ocean City, Maryland. I would use my shovels and plastic containers to build some kind of sand castle with big walls and a deep moat. I would place them just out of reach of the water in low tide, and the game was to see how it would withstand the rise of the tide. Heck I have been known to do this as a 50+ adult.
(now I am curious how the AgenticAI blog spammers will author comments all about the virtue of sand castles, but that’s another story).
Along with my recent efforts of sweeping a fleet of 12+ domains and web sites, archiving to my bone pile, and letting the registrations go, two larger ones loomed… util this month, when registrations and hosting for https://muraludg.org and https://theagoraonline.net come up for renewal.
I’m ready to let the waves of time reclaim them.
These were both significant projects I was part of 2015-2018, where I was not only building sites but also planning and implementing these projects. They were both things I am immensely grateful an almost accidental series of events –being on my fellowship at TRU, doing the wacky YouShow with Brian Lamb when we had a guest Tannis Morgan visiting, and she willing to play the part of “the consultant from Vancouver”.
Stop all the back narration! Through this, I got to be part of the UDG Agora project (archive link now) that Tannis managed with the Justice Institute of BC in collaboration with University of Guadalajara. Easily, this was THE Best project, team, participants, experience of my career. Okay, read the whole post for more
After two years of that project, the band was called together to organize a special institute on openness for UDG faculty, what we pulled off in 2018 as the UDG Moral of Open. It was a few years later, in 2021 Tannis contacted me to say that the domains and web sites that JIBC had registered and hosted were going to be let go. I asked or she offered, and I had it all transferred to me, and I have been keeping this going for the last 6+ years on my own time.
Why?
These were such key works and I also despise the clear cutting of web sites that companies and organizations do, it goes to my assertion that digital durability rides more on the individual than the institution.
But as I get older and cranky (just kidding), I start to wonder if anyone but me really cares about these sites. I can’t say one person has contacted me about them in 5+ years. All the links to the project from JIBC are gone. The web forgets only when people do.
So on June 1, when the renewal notice came in, I decided it was time to pack them up as an archive, and move my own domain.
Both of these are WordPress multisites, so archiving had a few bits to sort out. But my usual route of reaching for the OSX Site Sucker app (a $7 app made by a guy named Tick) paid off. It makes a static HTML version of sites, so I am not longer having to run, update, manage WordPress. I just let it loose to travel every link from the top, and for the most part, it “sucked up” into a directory on my Macbookpro.
That works for things linked from the main site, but as I often do, I sometimes toss other sites into the heap. So running through the other sites in the multisite admin helped find a few more from theagoraonline site and for muraludge I had to nab a tack on site I had did as an experiment. To note:
- theagoraonline.net All of the UDG agora actuall sat in a subdomain, there might have been the idea we might replicate the project in the future.
- Landing Page: Set up to be a holder at the top of the domain, archived at https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/holder/
- New landing page: Just made this quickly with an HTML5up template to guide the agora stuff https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/
- All of UDG Agora: https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/ includes a fleet
- The Challenge Bank (SPLOT version of DS106 assignment bank) https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/bank/
- The Daily Try (SPLOT version of DS106 Daily Create) https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/daily/
- Dilo – this was a problem, it was a discourse community at https://dilo.theagoraonline.net that was never archived nor is ther much in the internet archive. I ended up making an archive page https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/dilo/ but need to fix a bunch of internal links. One day
- Comparte – Rather proud of this version of the TRU Writer SPLOT I managed to manually translate into Spanish. All participants used it to write final reports as short papers https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/comparte/
Lesser used but still preserved: - Ask us Anything – I had found a WordPress theme to set up a site that kind of worked like a mini Twitter for participants to ask questions https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/ask/
- Welcome to the Agora – presentation made with the SPLOTpoint theme for the Open Education 2015 conference in Vancouver https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/opened15/
- ImagePool – a TRU Collector SPLOT we made… I think to have a place for workshop participants share and embed images from they needed to enter for the Challenge Banl responses. https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/imagepool/
- Edupunk, EduBauhaus, D.I.O? – Hah, a presentation (SPLOTpoint again) I copresented with Brian and Tannis for a conference in Guadalojara– they actually requested us to talk about EDUPUNK. This was crowned by maybe my favorite edited video ever, the Edupunk Mockumentary Enjoy it all https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/udg/ciinovapp
- Constellations Work Training Services – I forgot totally about this, a visualization experiment Tannis contracted me to do for this idea of displaying sets of work skills as constellations that could be navigated 3D wise using I think DJ3s. Actually this was hung on the muraludg site, but for some reason I slid it over to https://bones.cogdogblog.com/agora/constellation/
- muraludg.org – SiteSucker got everything, this site was maybe a little less sprawling? Lots of things copied form the agoraonline, SPLOTs and all
- Contestar – a version of the “Ask Me Anything” enjoy the archived error messages https://bones.cogdogblog.com/muraludg/contestar/
- Acumulador – Maybe the top use I have been part of for TRU Collector. We had working sessions in groups, and they all had generate a report by uploading an image of their sketch notes and provide information. https://bones.cogdogblog.com/muraludg/acumulador/
- Daily Opener – another iteration of the Daily Create. Rather impressive how much participation was in both of these by our colleagues in Mexico, many of whom seem to have never wiped out their accounts (judging by embeds that still work) https://bones.cogdogblog.com/muraludg/daily/
I thought I set up web redirects on the original domains, but looks like my chops are dusty. Regardless, they all go into the big web surf end of June and likely some cryptopokermassage scam site will grab the domain.
No regrets here and it was fun to do a little late night archiving. Sitesucker is THE Bomb, it does such a brilliant job of doing the WordPress to static HTML work, no need for me to be entangled with Claude.
I do remember a sandcastle thing I did, maybe the last time I did Ocean City with my folks before I went off to college. Rather than our usual August family vacation, we did a weekend in September when everything in that tourist town is dead quiet, the beaches with a handful of people. We stayed at the Stowaway Motel on 21st Street. (Why do I remember that?) I made then rather giant cone of sand, maybe 4 feet high, which I crowned with a crab exoskeleton I found. I remember some folks who came up the next day saying how they enjoyed spending all of the late day light watching my sand mountain take the hits (it was just a hump of sand in the morning).
So yeah, I love keeping my old sites up and going or at least archived, but who am I kidding? It’s all just sand piled up and the big waves will come one day. But its fun to build the walls oin defiance.
Featured Image: My own photo of one of several sand castles 2016/365/65 Built to Withstand the Sea flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license modified to slap my retired domains.
