Polverone
Now celebrating 21 years of madness
Posts: 3186
Registered: 19-5-2002
Location: The Sunny Pacific Northwest
Member Is Offline
Mood: Waiting for spring
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Content for sciencemadness
One of these days (honestly) I'm going to get around to putting up some web pages on sciencemadness in addition to the message board. There's already
an FAQ that I've written sitting somewhere around here. I've also thought of other content that would be good to put up over time, such as step by
step breakdowns of various experiments.
This is my grand Call for Content. I can't offer individual accounts to people who have material to contribute, but I would be glad to host good
material and credit its orginator. For example, if you have a page of experiments that's currently hosted on a lousy free server like Geocities, I'd
be happy to duplicate the content locally and credit you with it. It would be rather like having your own paid web host, with the disadvantage that
you have to wait for me or another administrator to upload any materials that you send to us.
So, eventually, there'd be an index page of contributors like this:
Fantastic_Contributor
Madscientists
Member_1
Member_2
Polverone
Zed
etc.
Each link would go to another page with that individual's content. But, as I said, it wouldn't exactly be like having your own paid host. I would
probably try to make sure that all the pages look at least somewhat similar and are legible. And, as I said before, the content and updates for the
pages would have to be processed by an admin before they would appear; there wouldn't be individual FTP accounts set up (at least not right away).
I welcome all sorts of content, but I can't/won't host any warez, improvised weapons information (general explosives is OK), or really large videos.
If you have content you'd like hosted on sciencemadness, let me or madscientist know via e-mail or private message.
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chemoleo
Biochemicus Energeticus
Posts: 3005
Registered: 23-7-2003
Location: England Germany
Member Is Offline
Mood: crystalline
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Great idea!
May I ask how much space you deem to provide? Per person, or rather, how much space there is altogether?
Also, I guess one of the problems is that of bandwidth, if there are lots of images etc, is there a chance that the bandwidth may be exceeded?
PS Strange, I never saw that post until now 
[Edited on 16-8-2004 by chemoleo]
Never Stop to Begin, and Never Begin to Stop...
Tolerance is good. But not with the intolerant! (Wilhelm Busch)
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Eliteforum
National Hazard
Posts: 571
Registered: 18-11-2002
Location: United Kingdom
Member Is Offline
Mood: Enjoying the journey
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It'd be best if each member that wanted their site on the host would use a set template for their site or something.
Would make it easier on you having to try and match all of the pages if everyones using the same template.
All that glitters isn't gold.
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Polverone
Now celebrating 21 years of madness
Posts: 3186
Registered: 19-5-2002
Location: The Sunny Pacific Northwest
Member Is Offline
Mood: Waiting for spring
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There's theoretically about 300 MB of free space available. Actual physical space on the main partition is lower than this. I seem to be getting
by okay by making symlinks to material in /var/tmp, but of course /var/tmp is (theoretically) temporary...
Uniformity would be nice, but I'm not too worried about that.
PGP Key and corresponding e-mail address
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JohnWW
International Hazard
Posts: 2849
Registered: 27-7-2004
Location: New Zealand
Member Is Offline
Mood: No Mood
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I am sure that a lot of space could be saved by storing material as ZIP or RAR archives wherever possible. Much of the FTP material is stored as many
small HTML and to a lesser extent PDF serial file sections, which could easily be compressed into multi-file archives to conserve space. The very
small files especially contribute to taking up space, because files are stored in clusters of 16Kb or 32 Kb, whch is the minimum that even the very
smallest files occupy.
John W.
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Polverone
Now celebrating 21 years of madness
Posts: 3186
Registered: 19-5-2002
Location: The Sunny Pacific Northwest
Member Is Offline
Mood: Waiting for spring
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There's a bunch of uncompressed HTML files on the FTP site? I must've missed those last time I was browsing. PDF compresses only slightly
when it contains a lot of images (i.e., scanned books especially). PDF without a lot of images does compress fairly well and has always led me to
wonder why PDF has never included a general lossless compressor, like DjVu does. I'm pretty sure axehandle is using reiserfs for the FTP, which
uses 4KB blocks, so he's not wasting quite as much space as you fear. And of course the extra granularity is nice when you want just one article,
not a bunch of them.
PGP Key and corresponding e-mail address
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peterthesmart
Harmless
Posts: 4
Registered: 9-8-2004
Member Is Offline
Mood: No Mood
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Storage Issues
If you guys are planning to include lots of pictures or other files on the sites, you can use Image Shack for pictures and YouSendIt for larger files.
Both sites offer these services for free.
http://s11.yousendit.com/
Handy for sending files under a gig, I'm not sure how long they store the files on the server though.
www.imageshack.us
Hosts pictures of various formats up to 1024kb in size, more than enough for most pictures. They store the pictures until they are not accessed for a
year.
If you use both sites, you'll be left mostly with HTML files, which take up barely any space.
[Edited on 18-8-2004 by peterthesmart]
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