Old Annex forum

Place where find documentation
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Fernando Perez
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Old Annex forum

Post by Fernando Perez »

I'm worried. Google's policy with its free services is to announce their abandonment, let them languish, and finally, suppress them. It is very likely that the old Annex forum will disappear, and with it, all our messages, advice and mutual aid from that time.
I have not been able to find any system that allows a backup copy that is really operational to move the content of the conversations to another environment.
With WGET, https://eternallybored.org/misc/wget/, it is possible to download html pages with the content of the messages, but they are pages that contain so much additional code that they are not practical. See this example https://myrapidq.it/oldforum/ejemplo.html: 12,500 lines of code for a few messages. And the problem of the links to the images.
I wanted to ask that Cicciocb, as the owner of the group, try to extract the content and provide it to me to create a backup copy that I would make available to all of you for the future.
Can you look at https://takeout.google.com/? I can't check it because I don't have any group, but this screen seems to indicate that the content of the messages can be downloaded in MBOX format.
image.png
And please, if anyone has any thoughts on this, I'd appreciate it.
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cicciocb
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Re: Old Annex forum

Post by cicciocb »

HI Fernando,
thanks for your efforts, I'll try to download the content and send you for "survive" purposes.

In the while I found a backup copy of the old site I did some months before the "end" and I uploaded it here

[Local Link Removed for Guests]
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Re: Old Annex forum

Post by Fernando Perez »

Thanks to you, Cicciocb.
Unfortunately, "the bank always wins", that is, Google.
If you do a little research, you'll see that in both your backup and mine, most of the images are still hosted on googleusercontent.com, and therefore at the expense of Google deleting them any day.
Example:
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/syoMY ... qmc0mC-uJ-
:cry: :evil:
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Re: Old Annex forum

Post by cicciocb »

I should also have a backup of all the images on my Google drive
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Re: Old Annex forum

Post by Electroguard »

Be patient Fernando, I already 'beat the bank' 15 months ago !
Am trying to do it again to get the latest.
Francesco, if a 50Mb website clone was unzipped to an Annex32 device, could a script ripple through all the html files to remove unwanted references?
Or would it be easy for a 'programmer' to do on computer ?
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Re: Old Annex forum

Post by Fernando Perez »

Robin, you should tell us how you managed to beat Google. Every time we are less and we are older, but the new generations deserve it. Or not?
Jokes aside, with the right tool you can more or less easily perform the search and replacement of text in any file and, what is better, in several files at the same time.
The bad thing is that I know that you only work on Linux and my preferred tool is for Windows. It's fast, free (GPL) and can perform search/replace not only traditionally but also using regular expressions.
https://tools.stefankueng.com/grepWin.html
And it does not need installation, it is a single executable, portable.
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Re: Old Annex forum

Post by Electroguard »

You are welcome to a copy of the cloned website Fernando, but I need to zip it up and make it available somehow (is about 50Mb)... and probably best not to publish it as a website without removing all kopyrite from all pages first, bearing in mind that all pages were created from google templates.

I didn't pay much attention to the cloning details at the time (was just happy for it to work), but I cannot remember the name of the website now.
In hindsight I think it used an xml script which downloaded all external url references locally and appended something to the resulting filenames which prevents redirection and causes local loading, eg: wemos.jpg becomes wemos.jpg?attredirects=0
If you take a look at the 2 screendumps below it may make a bit more sense.
The file manager recognises the pics as graphics files cos it displays thumbnails of them, and they load in some graphics apps, but not all.
More importantly, xmlns= seems to be a way to associate urls to individual web items via xml namespaces, but I don't know much more than that.

xmlns.jpg

localAnnexWebsite.jpg
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Re: Old Annex forum

Post by cicciocb »

[Local Link Removed for Guests] wrote: [Local Link Removed for Guests]Tue Mar 21, 2023 2:54 pm Thanks to you, Cicciocb.
Unfortunately, "the bank always wins", that is, Google.
If you do a little research, you'll see that in both your backup and mine, most of the images are still hosted on googleusercontent.com, and therefore at the expense of Google deleting them any day.
Example:
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/syoMY ... qmc0mC-uJ-
:cry: :evil:

As per my understanding, the pictures are stored inside my google drive account so should be there as long as my account is alive
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Re: Old Annex forum

Post by Fernando Perez »

Robin, I interpret, through Google translate, that years ago you created a website using Google templates.
You've managed to download a backup of your site.
That that copy contains unnecessary and redundant code that you want to remove or replace before republishing your web pages elsewhere.
If so, I have no problem trying to help you, within my knowledge on the subject. Upload the file to some server, for example mega.nz and send me the link by private message.
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Re: Old Annex forum

Post by Electroguard »

Fernando, let me know if this works for you, or if you still wish me to post up the zip.
In your case you can quickly skip to Commandline because you already have WGET, but I've given more detail for the benefit of anyone else interested.

WGET is a commandline utility which is available for all platforms but not necessarilly already pre-installed.
WGET comes pre-installed on MX Linux, which can be downloaded and run in a temporary live boot session, eg: using Ventoy usb.
Here are links for optionally downloading MX Linux or Ventoy if needed, and a video showing how to create a Ventoy usb with optional data partition.
(anything done during a temporary live session will be lost when the session is closed unless it has been saved elsewhere)

Select MX official monthly snapshot... https://sourceforge.net/projects/mx-lin ... Snapshots/
Download Ventoy (linux or windows version as appropriate)... https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html
(if keeping the Ventoy usb, it may be useful to also download and copy on Ventoy-livecd.iso, for updating Ventoy without needing the OS app)
Ventoy usage video... https://odysee.com/@Electroguard:d/VentoyData:b


Create a folder somewhere for the local clone, change into it, then open a terminal session or commandline in that folder.
(eg: in MX File Manager, right-click Desktop and select Create folder then enter tmp, right-click inside the new folder and select Open Terminal Here)

Copy and paste the following line into the terminal commandline then hit Enter to run it (the example of annexwifi is being used because it is familiar)

Commandline
wget --mirror --page-requisites --convert-link --no-clobber --no-parent [Local Link Removed for Guests]


Depending on speed of internet connection this can take a few minutes to download all images referenced in the selected website.
To test, disconnect the internet connection then drill down into [Local Link Removed for Guests] with the file browser and open home.html in a web browser. It should be possible to navigate and view the local clone pages complete with images.
The pic below shows the resulting clone properties, which is about 45Mb when zipped.
Amazingly, the MX archive manager PeaZip allows me to navigate the local clone website from within the zip archive without unzipping it.

It should also be possible to similarly create local clones of other websites, perhaps online help.
The clone parent directory will be the specified domain (www.ciccio.com in the example) but the --no-parent option prevents clone links referring up to it, so it is possible to have clones of different sub domain websites in the same parent domain folder.

The Obvious
Despite rumours, nobody really knows what people may get up to behind closed doors.
But it would be wise not to publicly display any indiscretions which could have repercussions, without trying to mitigate them first.
For instance, if I had tried to impress an old flame by tattooing her name throughout web pages, I would now remove such evidence before my wife sees it.
If aware of what string to look for and what type of files to look in, there will be recursive search and replace utilities available on any platform.



properties.jpg
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