Web Set on Arganee.world: Ten Years Archived

The night sky has dimmed out on planet arganee.world. From the surface, Earth has dipped below the horizon for the last time. As part of my domain sweeping started in April this year I had turned off the Hover auto-renew for a domain I set up in 2016 as a home for the Networked Narratives course.

I have hopefully managed to archive as much of this WordPress multisite that include 10 different subdomain sites, the task was not simple and took an array of tools/time, but as of now I have it all saved at https://bones.cogdogblog.com/arganee/

Arganee Genesis

It was 10 months ago today that I attended the Digital Media & Learning Conference at UC Irvine (holy bleep did I do long conference posts then). One small part of it was getting to meet Mia Zamora, we had been emailing over the summer as she was interested in perhaps combining forces with the Electronic Literature Courses she taught at Kean University with the digital/web storytelling stuff I had been doing then for 5 years with DS106. This converged at DML where there was much interest in what became known as Connected Courses, ones where students all documented/narrated their own learning processes in blogs they owned or managed, but were “connected” RSS/Syndication style with a course site.

I recall Mia and I talking during conference break at an outside table, and our brainstorming was so loud I think that others cam over to see what was going on. We had landed on the idea of playing with digital storytelling as having some mysterious force that was practiced like digital alchemy. The name we came up with was Networked Narratives, lending itself to a nifty #netnarr hashtag.

This led to playing with rot13, a clever means of encoding messages by swapping every letter in a word with the letter that was 13 characters later. I pulled the site up, put netnarr into it and …. arganee emerged. That was the spirit of play and mystery we saw in the course.

I volunteered to get a domain and registered arganee.world, setting it up as a WordPress multisite (not sure why but that was helpful later).

The Arganee Entrance / Calling Card

With much energy focused on Domains of Ones Own and doing work/presentations on it, I had noticed often thet the first thing people usually did then with a new domain was to install a WordPress blog right at the top of the domain. I got interested in promoting the idea of considerung a “Calling Card” small site at the entrance of the domain and then adding blogs, cv sites, projects as different subdomains within.

Thus for Networked Narratives and its mystery aura, I opted to out a vague site at the top of arganee.world. It is a mod of the HTML5Up Eventually Template as a WordPress theme. But as I was also playing more at the time with the WordPress API, I figured out a way to create 40+ blog “posts” each just a title that was a quote from science fiction or some random text from a technobabble site, that would randomly be pulled into display on the arganee.world site.

Yes, Virginia there is a blog post about this pseudo cleverness.

The point was not really to send anyone there unless they got curious and pulled the domain out from its subdomains. I ahve archived the site at https://bones.cogdogblog.com/arganee/ which includes some explanation and links to all the archived subsites, but you can see the original site that hung out on the net for 10 years at https://bones.cogdogblog.com/arganee/genesis.html

Networked Narratives

archived: https://bones.cogdogblog.com/arganee/netnarr

I have more than enough blog posts about NetNarr but perhaps the best origin story summarizes what would unfold in the first iteration in 2016

Networked Narratives Open Course? Nurse Ratched Sez “CogDog, Time for Your Medicine”

But its worth saying that the way I got to co-teach this course was unlike any other online/hybrid course I have come across, perhaps the descriptor would be an Inverse Hybrid. The set up for NetNarr in 2017 and 2018 was that the class was in person at Kean University, Mia was the instructor in the room, but I did all my teaching remotely from Arizona, coming in weekly through Google Hangouts. Again, the students were in person, one of their instructors was not.

Plus we taught the course openly, so there were participants ds106 style from many places who would do the assignments or show up for our “Studio Visits”

Among many highlights of NetNarr 2017 was a surprise.

Alchemy Us

I had travel plans to go to Toronto in late April for the Creative Commons conference, so it was easy to plan flights for a stopover in Newark. Mia and I hatched this plan, as the last class was a potluck.I was there, hiding in a side room to where the class met. Mia expressed to the group my sadness about not being there, but made reference to mystery noises next door.

I then emerged to surprise the students, showing I was not just a figure on a screen. It was rather amazing. Heck the moment still floats on The Platform I Will Only Call Twitter.

On the last day of class, Professor Alan Levine surprised #digitalstorytelling with an in-person visit! @MiaZamoraPhD @cogdog #netnarr @KUWP pic.twitter.com/fTL550XKwB

— Kean Writing Studies (@KUWSP) May 6, 2017

And I forgot how we had done a bit of a video narrative about the course, each week Mia and I would record a video for each class, and each week, there was more signs that somehow we were being “hacked” – You can watch the wholes series just in case there is nothing on Netflix.

This was the largest site to archive and I likely missed much of it, as it not only included all the posts and pages from the course, but all the blogging that was aggregated into the site with FeedWordPress (well at least the references to the blogs, not guessing how many kept their web sites).

The archive includes the course from 2017 and 2018. In 2019, it was even more exotic, as that was the year Mia had a fellowship to teach in Norway. Somehow she convinced the Kean English department to let me teach remotely to the class at Kean, and I was assisted greatly by previous students Marissa and Hailey who were my in room TAs. We did a bunch of activities in parallel with Mia’s class she was teaching in Norway. We had a theme that was aimed at tje students each contributing to a Field Guide for Digital Wellness in a Post Truth Internet Era.

We continued the approach in 2020 and 2021, but I had moved the courses to new sites, we took on the model of riffing from Black Mirror, both these courses archived as well

• Networked Narratives 2020 Net Mirror: Not Necessarily Dystopia 
• Networked Narratives 2021 Post Pandemic University

At least as well all the weekly videos and studio visit archives are still alive in the NetNarr YouTube channel 47 of them in total.

The Rest of the NetNarr Fleet, Archived

As things played out I found the reason to justify making more WordPress sites to use in NetNarr, again, these are all (hopefully) archived.

• Daily Digital Alchemy (Daily creative challenges, 2016-)  these were used all years, completely built as mirrors of the DS106 Daily Create. We got up to 380 of them, with the last one in November 2022
• Netnarr Somniporta (media collector, 2019-)  I saw some need in class as a place for students to post/share images they made, so this was a reason to set up a site based on the TRU Collector SPLOT
• Network Narratives Mirror World (NetNarr class project, 2017) Part of the first year of NetNarr we asked students to create alternative identities, so they would enter this Mirror World (rorrom backwards) to blog as their character. Weird, eh?
• Arganee Journal (Student writing, 2018-) This time another SPLOT came into the mix, TRU Writer, as a place where students would publish final projects that came together as our own class journal. I’m really glad to have these artifacts, as on the students blogs they would have withered away. My there is good stuff here, its been too long.
• Netnarr GIF Reader (GIF Resource 2018) Assembled as merely a reference for learning about the meaning and making of animated GIFs. And indeed, this was published with a third SPLOT, the antidote to PowerPoint I called SPLOTpoint. It still works
• Pandemic Whispers (Anonymous writing, 2021- ) a place we encourage anonymous writing about living through the pandemic, one more use of TRU Writer,
• Research Networked Seminar (MA Thesis course at Kean University, 2018-2019) Even more in the bold moved by Kean, while Mia was away for a year, she arranged for me to lead the seminars for her MA Thesis students, most of whom were students in NetNarr. I was a remote thesis advisor, and so Is et up the same style site where the students blogged their own progress. The flavor of it again was… non-traditional as explaied in the first post #ResNetSem Green Pill or Red Pill [Bitter Pill]?

Another Go Around With Static HTML Archiving of WordPress Sites

This was a bit of a long process I started in September. I started trying to put into play the method I had used before, the Mac app SiteSucker

Archiving Old WordPress Sites as Static HTML

Part of the challenge is that SiteSicker needs links to follow to all it needs to crawl .My first effort was to add to the original front page of arganee.world links to all the subdomain sites. I set it loose overnight, but it was only partly successful. It might have timed out, but also very likely I have have triggered some firewalls for heavy access at Reclaim Hosting.

I decided to give one of the WordPress plugin approaches. My first look was Simply Static, but using it on multisite was a $ feature. So I then looked at Staatic and it looked promising, though I would have to run it separately on each subsite. I tried it first on the smaller sites. I felt confident as it seemed Staatic would march through every page post, and not rely on link paths.

There are a ton of settings, and it took a few go arounds to get a working flow.

The first reckoning is these sites are going from something like journal.arganee.world as a subdomain site to a site in a subdirectory e.g. bones.cogdogblog.com/arganee/journal So I found that putting the intended URL in the Build settings would work to make all links reference the full future web address (not optimal should it ever move, but alas, this is its last stop).

I might have done one run by having Staatic create an archive as a downloadable ZIP, but that’s a lot of traffic. So what did work mostly is discovering that it created a local directory deep within the WordPress multisite structure .e.g /wp-content/uploads/site/X/staatic/ It creates a staging subdiretory with temp files, but the final site ends up in a subdirectory named deploy I dound that my asking a subdirectory named the same directory I would use, e.g. for journal.arganee.world I asked for it to put the deploy files into a directory there called journal.

So I would end up with this inside the multisite:

Once done, I could move that entire directory in one command using the File Mananger in cPanel

I did try some advance settings in Staatic too, like giving it a longer time for http requests.

Mostly this worked well, but I noted in a few archive attempts, that some portions ended up archived as 301 redirect error pages. I tried a number of changes in settings, but for some reason it kept seeing redirects where I did not have them. And then the big hiccups was trying to run it on the passive NetNarr course site, it would chew through 16000 pages, and just hang on the last 3 percent, and generating a bunch of redirect or cURL errors. I gave it longer to process (like 24 hours) but I bet my IP was setting off red alerts at Reclaim Hosting.

Alas, in a reversal, I went back to Site Sucker to do the 2 NetNarr courses from 2020 and 2021, and then let it loose overnight for the big NetNarr. What might had helped is that I found a setting that I could generate a random number of seconds between requests so it might generate less flags.

Whether this was the magic or not, I did finally managed to get a full archive of the large NetNarr site, that was in all about 500+Mb that I did have to upload to my server as a zip and unarchive there in the cpanel File Manager.

Dusting the Archive Broom

I really doubt anyone will venture too far into these archives, but I feel better about preserving them, not just flushing them away. At tis point, I am down to 3 domains in my Hover, one more is due for an archive. I have one more at Reclaim, but I am down from before having maybe 14.

If anything it was a delight to remember this phase of unconventional ways teaching, when the focus was on students creating and sharing media, but more so, practicing web awareneess (we had focuses on privacy, surveillance, dystopias) and always always always robust and often silly storytelling.

But alas, arganee.world as a domain is silent but can live on quietly in retirement.

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Featured Image The title of the arganee.world web site on top of one of the 4 images that appear in the background of the archived site, the images I had found maybe on a NASA site, but the one shown here is Pluto (artist’s impression) found at the European Southern Observatory shared there as CC BY.