Updates on the Never-Ending Reclaim Project

So with all of the weirdness that is going on in the Ed Tech world recently and the general world today, I needed something to take my mind off of things. I wanted to add a quick update about my Never-Ending Reclaim Project at the end of that post… but it ended up being too long! So, in the interest of archiving the good, the bad, and the ugly of what I am finding out there (not all of it is being kept even if I am reclaiming access)…. here are some interesting (to me, at least) updates of where things are.

First of all, its pretty weird trying to make sure you have ownership of every account you have created. Random things in life suddenly remind you of things you had totally forgotten. Walking by a store one day reminds you “oh, hey – RedBox still exists and I think I had an online account there as well.” Or a random link reminds you that you also had a Reddit account at one time. All reclaimed!

I finally came to a place of acceptance with the not-quite-perfect html exports of WordPress sites. It seems that everything from site suckers to WP plugins just don’t get what relative truly means. Or maybe I just don’t get the settings correct? Anyways – it seems they always add a slash at the beginning of base level files like this: “/images/picture.jpg” or “/css/style.css” or whatever.  That forces my computer and the websites where I deposit them to look in the base directory for everything – but I am trying to get them to go in a sub-folder of an “archive” folder. So the browser just sits there forever trying to figure out what is going on. For less complex websites, its easy enough to remove that slash quickly (“images/picture.jpg” or “css/style.css” or whatever) – and boom! instant relative website that can work online or offline where ever I put it. When archiving WordPress sites with complicated folder structures, it takes a bit of thinking to know how many “../” or “../../” etc to replace those “/” with – and time consuming if you have to think through all “/” in your document.

There is one workaround to make it a bit easier. I have found exporting from within WordPress to be a bit better than external site suckers, because WordPress will still get you all of your orphaned files and pages. This means that bad link you didn’t realized was there can be fixed with one edit, rather than jumping into archive.org to hope and pray that the file is there (only about 50/50 record of that so far for me, unfortunately). Plus, you can hard code a long link with your website address in there – making finding and replacing absolute links with relative “../../” links very, very quick and easy per page. Which I wrote about before – but it’s the best option I have found so far.

The reason this is important is because the old LINK website has bit the dust for now it seems. This was apparently a problem with Google and not the people running the site. They tried everything they could to renew the website registration – but it was originally registered through Google. Let me warn you: don’t do that. It starts easy enough to register… but renewals get harder and more complicated each time. I experienced this a couple of years myself – and it just got worse after that.

Anyways, I was able to get html archives of all LINK lab sites just in case something went wrong (again, it just seemed inevitable the way Google was going). So I have html back-ups of DALMOOC, Pivot to Online Learning MOOC, Open Ed MOOC, etc. Most of these are hard coded to work on my personal website – but I have been able to get DALMOOC converted over to true relative html. I can easily move that folder where ever I want – or send the files to whatever archive site the good folks still bearing the LINK torch set up for LINK Lab. I will work on the other courses as I get time as well.

The other weird thing that happened is that I actually got control of my MySpace account back! The form that I linked to in the last post… actually worked? I mean, it took over a month to hear anything, but I am back in. And it is a sad wasteland in there. Almost all real data is gone – and only a few pictures remain of the many I uploaded. But I now control my corner of the wasteland at least.

I also was able to somewhat re-create the custom profile I made back in the day. The html template I found on GitHub was cool, but also several years beyond the last version I had used. My resurrected custom code didn’t work. But I poked around in archive.org and found a save of Tom’s profile from the date that I saved my custom code. I put the two together, and BAM! I had my profile back in html! Well, it was Tom’s profile styled like mine. So I started replacing Tom’s information with mine as best as I could remember it (or using Latin sample text where I couldn’t). I also found a way to make an image of the profile music player that plays the sample of music that I had on there if you click it.

Now… before I share the link, please keep in mind that I realize this profile has some cultural appropriation. At the time, I was married to someone that traced their heritage back to India, so I was trying to mix her heritage and mine (Irish) on my MySpace page. But anyways – today I would replace the Hindi and sitar (yes I did actually learn to play a few songs on it, even though I have forgotten how) with something from my cultural background. But this is what it was back in the day.

Now, if only I could get the the Foursquare/Swarm people to be as…. umm… “responsive” as the MySpace team…

I also seem to have found some of the limitations of Ruffle – you can’t really import external files (images, other SWF files, etc), which I did a lot in tthe E-SPY X-500. So I just had to link to an external list of the lessons that I wanted to import into the game. I set it up that way because we wanted to be able to upgrade the lessons as needed without re-doing the entire game. For example, the Tobacco Lesson 11 lets the student build a simple Tobacco awareness website – it was pretty basic, but we had bigger plans to make it more robust. But at least it works as originally designed now. Oh, and you have to use the back button to get back to the list.

I also found that many ActionScript functions don’t work in Ruffle, like the code that makes text scroll within small boxes. Oh, well. Maybe there has been an update that I need to look into.

After doing some poking around on Digg and Delicious, it seems that my original Digg account is gone forever (unless someone knows of a way to log in with email?), but Delicious is still around. Kind of. I was able to log in and export my posts from there. It seems like it is just a data repository of your old stuff (can’t add new stuff), but that is a start. You can export to JSON and HTML formats – if you can remember your password (it seems like the password reset function is not implemented yet). The html format also doesn’t look that great, and it saved the tags and dates even though they aren’t displayed. So I decided to grab the html and CSS from their site to make my archive look a lot cleaner. I also decided to go for 60 resultsw per page rather than 20, because mine were all short “Ed Tech new updates” type things anyways.

Anyways, I find this type of stuff fascinating. Some of you might think I am trying too hard to get stuff that should be forgotten, and maybe you are right. Especially after seeing how my old MySpace profile looked. I still need to find a way to convert old Flash files to html5 (without buying an Adobe subscription). I also wonder if I can find a site that emulates old installs of LAMP so I can get a 14 year old export of WordPress working again (WP tells me its too old to import now – boo!). More things to look into!

The Never-Ending Reclaim Project Continues

Like many of you, I have been spending a considerable amount of time reclaiming my data and spaces online. A lot of that is focused on downloading and archiving my data (especially blog posts, reviews, comments, etc) from a myriad of websites I have used through the years. Well, decades now. I don’t know if this post will be of interest to anyone, but it will be a record (Jim Groom-style) for me – and hopefully someone will stumble across a couple of problems I have run into and have some suggestions for me.

So this all started several years (or more) ago when I ran into the idea of the IndieWeb and realized I didn’t have to lose data to dying websites like MySpace and Jaiku. I could take a proactive approach by collecting my information and storing it on my own (and the awesome folks at Reclaim Hosting make it super easy in many ways). So I started downloading data from various websites, and importing blog or informational posts from any website that I could. Then I realized two email addresses I used for a lot of websites through the years could possibly die someday, so I started going back to where ever I could find those email addresses and reclaimed access to those services. Which was mostly on a bunch of dead or dying websites, but it uncovered more posts and blogs to archive. Then several unexpected unfortunate events happened to me last year and this year. Finding out my job in academia was being eliminated caused me to comb through 15 years of signing up for all kinds of services and journals and all kinds of things to discover even more stuff to reclaim. Then an unexpected divorce also caused me to have to comb through even more stuff online, causing even more stuff to reclaim to come to light. So here are the basics of what I found out.

Downloading your data from websites is usually the most straight forward process, as long as the site offers a data download option or an export feature for your posts. One thing I have noticed is that the data that is downloaded does change from time to time – for instance, a good friend of mine suddenly died a few years ago and his family deleted all of his online accounts. So now there are posts on Facebook where he and I had long conversations that just look like I am arguing with myself. So instead of deleting previous data downloads with new, fresh downloads – I keep an archive of past exports. Did a past one capture those conversations that are now one-sided? I don’t know, but I should go look. I really hope so.

Then there were things like Jaiku that are long gone, but I never got a chance to download the data. Bummer. However, thanks to the work of the Internet Archive I did find a lot of my Jaiku posts in their archives. So I decided to copy the html and stitch together my own archive of some my jaikus – including a few comment that I could also find and some pages from the Jaiku site just for nostalgia. Clicking on any avatar on that page leads to me. Some of the other links work as well. But this little archive shows that even 12 years ago Jaiku was way more interesting than Twitter. I also archived as much as I could of the EduGeek Journal Jaiku channel as well. Interesting that this is where Twitter Hashtags directly got the # from (even though technically it came from older sources, it was Jaiku’s Channels that made Twitter users start using the # to mimic the function).

One site that is sadly long gone is MySpace. I can’t even sign in or reset my password anymore (probably hacked a long time ago). But the important data is gone – it seems MySpace lost or deleted most of it. I should have captured the html and custom CSS I worked for hours on way back in the day. But even the mighty Internet Archive didn’t capture any of that. However, after digging around some, I found this form to submit a support ticket, and then a GitHub project that has Tom’s MySpace profile html. And then searching through my files at home, of course I kept a copy of the CSS I created to customize my profile. So I might have to just make up a bunch of stuff about myself to replace the stuff about Tom, but I could actually have an archive of all of the time I wasted…. errr… “invested” in learning how to hack a custom MySpace profile.

Of course, the biggest project has been capturing my blogs. I thought I only had a handful of Blogger sites to import to WordPress, but then I kept digging up more. WordPress sites for several grad classes.  Old conference blogs. Old work blogs. Some attempts to use Known. Even a short attempt at Tumblr. So many short blogs. So I imported all that I could into one WordPress blog archive on my own site. All of that is easy. Some of the blogs that I liked I even created html archives of the layout. The one that I am having trouble with is Instagram. I would love to import all of my Instagram posts to WordPress blog with a template like the one I set up for my artwork gallery. I found some suggestions online for how to do that, but they only import the last 20 entries. I can import the rest one by one using copy and paste if I want to, but hopefully someone will come up with a way to automate it. Any ideas?

Of course, some of these blogs were older WordPress installations on my website, while others were attached to classes like the HumanMOOC that only make sense as a complete package. But its a pain to keep over a dozen WordPress installations updated and working. So I decided it was time to archive some sites as they are as html exports and shut down the WordPress version. The problem is, I really wanted a stand alone html export that could be moved to any folder or website and still work. The most recommended WordPress html export tool that I found when I started a few years ago (WP Static) doesn’t really work well for the relative links needed to do that. I could export to a defined folder on my site and it would hard code those specific links into every page, but then I can’t move it around (the Jaiku archive I created above can work any where I put it, or even offline if needed).  WP Static does have a relative link function, but it keep messing up the number of “../”‘s you need to make links work. Half the time, it just gets lost and serves up a blank page. Even a quick search and replace on a page doesn’t fix it.

So I looked around at other options, none worked any different. Even desktop based site suckers well… they suck too much. What I mean is, if there is a link to another website on your site, it will try to suck that entire site as well! Finally, I found Simply Static. It has a relative link function as well, and it doesn’t work right out of the download either. But it only messes up in one way, and a quick find and replace on a page makes your archived page spring to life. The only problem is that because of the layers upon layers of sub directories that WordPress uses, you have to do a find and replace per page to get the correct number of “../”‘s right. So it’s a quick process on simple sites… but a longer process on more complex sites. But it works in the end. I have a standalone html archive of the HumanMOOC that I helped to co-design and co-teach that will work where ever I put it. A bonus feature is that I got to finally fix some of the things that I didn’t have time to get right in the WordPress version. The activity bank images never worked right, but now I can have an image per activity. The blog hub now has individual avatars per person so you can see who posted what. The DALMOOC, OpenEdMOOC, and Pivot MOOC should be coming soon. ish.

Then there were other random things I needed to archive. All of my Storify archives, which neatly exported to html, but are slowly dying out as people close accounts, or Twitter changes how they display pictures, or a hundred other reasons. Is it worth going through each one and grabbing what is left? Several chatbots I created are still kicking around, but also falling apart as I need to apparently update the code to not point to the dead LINK Lab website. Add that one to my massive to-do list. Even an old OLC presentation that I did “choose your own presentation topic” style with the audience.

Oh, and going way back there are a good number of html websites I designed 1999-2005 that I am still keeping around for memory sake. Most are too embarrassing to link to, but the one I like the most is the one that I mention in several bios – the website I created to help students when I was an 8th grade Science teacher: Mr. Crosslin’s Class Online. Also my first serious attempt at putting course work online.

Speaking of old sites, I have so many sites that I built in Flash that I have been trying to figure out what to do with for years. I can still open Flash on an ancient computer I have, so I have exported all of my Flash files to image and/or movie files. But some are still a bit complex for that, and even the less complex ones are no fun to watch as a movie. Is there a way to convert FLA files to HTML5? I have looked a little and didn’t like what I found. If anyone knows of a way, even if I have to pay, please let me know.

So I thought for a while that my archives of several websites I created with Flash would be limited to still images of what happened. But then I came across Ruffle. You drop a couple of files on your site, and a few lines of code on your page, and – BAM! – your Flash files start magically working. So now I can get the old U Monthly Magazine archives back online (a lot is still missing, but I will dig it out eventually). My favorite Flash website I (mostly) created is the E-SPY X-500 – a goofy attempt at an educational game that I created for a company that I worked for after teaching.  Go ahead and kick around in there – not every thing works (yet, but on the list), but see if you can find the hidden Easter eggs. You can log in with any username or password over three characters. It has been totally disconnected from the MySQL database, so no data is collected. I should point out that the cartoon characters you will see once inside were not drawn by me, but our staff artist at the time Samuel Torres.

Of course, I have also be going through and making sure that my main portfolio is up to date, because it really serves as an archive of papers, presentations, videos, artwork, and other projects as well. I have also been working on things like a games archive. All kinds of random attempts to create games are in there, including some of the ones I mentioned above (I still need to create a Twine environment for the This Picture app game idea). Oh, and somewhere in the middle of all of this, I am also trying to work with my Mom to create a tribute site to my Grandfather’s artwork, since he sold paintings and worked as a staff artist for a newspaper in a major city.

Changing over email address is quite the chore. I had to look for old accounts with two old email addresses in them, and then I had to go through 15 years of work emails to see which accounts I would want to keep after leaving (mostly access to journals I published in, review accounts, professional website accounts, and others like that). Most places were pretty straight forward. Some places were not. It took a lot of work to get control of my Flickr account. I still can’t get control of my MySpace account – does their support team still even exist? A lot of these accounts I will probably shut down. But I was surprised at how haphazard I was in using whatever email address to sign up for whatever account. At least its all back with me again. And, of course, trying to separate 20 years of joint accounts from my former marriage was a huge undertaking. Some places make it nearly impossible to do that. But then I had to go back through all of these accounts I got back or websites I created and update bio listings about family where needed.

So, even though there isn’t a light at the end of tunnel, I know that a sighting of that light should come soon. Despite all that is left, I still feel that I have cut back my online presence to a streamlined, manageable amount. Someday I will be shutting down some massive websites like this one, so I hope to find even better ways to convert WordPress to html as well. Which I guess I will… give to my son some day? Donate to a museum? Will be people even care about archives like this in a few decades? I guess I will figure that out someday…

Reclaim the Front Page of Your Learning Experience for #IndieEdTech

One of the most contested areas in online learning is what I sometimes call the “front page” – usually the user interface or splash page or whatever main area learners first see when they start a course/learning experience/etc (usually also the main area they have to come back to every time). Schools want to control the “front page” learners see first in their class (usually always the learning management system they paid big money for). Ed-Tech companies want to control the “front page” learners see when they use their product. Other non-educational websites that get used in education like Twitter or Facebook want to control the “front page” of what users see. Of course, the average learner uses many of these services and has to navigate through many tools that are trying to control what you see while they learn, to control the “front page” of their learning experience.

The “front page” is how companies gather data for analytics so they can monetize users. Think back to the major changes between MySpace and Facebook. As horrible as MySpace could look at times, users could insert CSS and control all manner of aspects of their front page. That control was a good thing, despite the eye sores it created from time to time. How can a company monetize a MySpace user page when users can completely remove portions of the page? How can a company monetize interactions when users rarely have to leave their “space” to interact with others? The changes between MySpace and Twitter/Facebook resolve a lot of those issues, and hence created the battle for the “front page” of users’ internet experience.

This may not seem to be a big deal to many, but as we have been researching learner agency by giving learners modality choice in a customizable modality pathway design (aka “dual-layer”), the “front page” becomes a very, very important space that existentially affects learner choice in major ways. The tool that learners begins a learning experience in becomes the place they are comfortable with, and they resist venturing past the “front page” of that tool. You might have run into this problem with, say, introducing Twitter into a course taught in Blackboard. Many learners start to complain that the Bb forums would work just fine. There is a stickiness to the front page that keeps learners in there and away from other tools.

Shouldn’t the learner be in control of this “front page?” Shouldn’t this “front page” display their map of what they want to learn? Shouldn’t the tools and content and things they want to learn with/from support this map, linking from the learners “front page” rather than competing with it?

This is pretty much the big problem we run into with the customizable modality pathway design. The “front page” control battle segments the learning process, pulls learners away, makes them comfortable with giving up control of that space, and enforces the status quo of instructor-controlled learning. Up to this point, we have been working on design and structure – all of which is, for better or worse, coalescing into a design theory/method of some kind. However, the technology is simply in the way most of the time, mainly because very few tools actually work to give the learner control. They mostly all attempt to put their tool in control, and by extension, the person (instructor and school admins) behind the tool in control as well.

edugeek-journal-avatarIn many ways, I think this issue connects to the Indie Ed-Tech movement. I’ll be blogging more about that over the next few weeks/months. I’ll need to cover how the technology that allows learners to reclaim the “front page” of their learning experience could look – turning the idea of a “Neutral Zone” into a learning map that learners build (and then connect artifacts to create a “portfolio” map of what they did). This will allow learners to mix and match what tools, services, course, etc they learn from, leading to alternative ways to prove/certify that they have specific knowledge and skills, fueled by owning their own domain, APIs, cool stuff, etc. Of course, since any work in Indie Ed-Tech needs a music reference, I will be taking up Adam Croom’s challenge for someone to write about grunge rock (not my favorite style of music – Audrey Watters already used that one – but a good genre to represent the angle I am going for). So, yes, I have a good dozen blog posts in mind already, so time to get cracking.

(image credit: “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” by Nina Vital)