The c2 wiki was down | Hacker News Reader

The c2 wiki was down

c2.com

196 pointswtbob39 comments

https://twitter.com/WardCunningham/status/785960076041302016

> http://c2.com is again serving web requests after several days of disk repair.

That is technically correct, c2.com is serving web requests, but the wiki is still down. I hope it comes back, notwithstanding the availability of the content on archive.org.

We have news from Ward. The c2 wiki will be moved over to a federated wiki, whatever this means.

Discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12715560.

He's telling you "Google 'federated wiki'". It's a pretty neat concept, actually.

Yep, I fixed it. Thanks.

I'd read it not as "Google (the company) federated wiki (product name)", but rather as "google (verb) federated wiki (keyword describing a technology)" - i.e. https://www.google.com/search?q=federated+wiki, or http://ddg.gg?q=federated+wiki if you prefer.

Yes, I fixed it. Thanks for the pointers.

Aww hell no, this is one gigantic cultural artefact that needs to stay afloat.

I wish they reenabled comments if they haven't already. It was disabled shortly after I discovered it. I ended up reading all kinds of discussions there as they were really interesting.

When I found out about c2 I was both after the read only mode I believe, and way too uneducated to be able to comment on anything, too much content :D

Yes. The XmlIsaPoorCopyOfEssExpressions page is/was a classic.

Updated with archive link:

http://web.archive.org/web/20160820214102/http://c2.com/cgi/...

I remember that page. Thinking back some of the stuff on Plain Text formats, the Unix Way, YNGNI really did influence me.

Yeah, in a way a lot of those discussions were a last gasp of folks trying to do things correctly, before everyone learned to just relax and enjoy going with the flow.

It makes me sad to read them now, a decade or more later, and think of what might have been.

Yeah, my page is gone... This is really an old thing for sure, packed with interesting stuff.

Never heard of backups at C2? Geez, this is just a bunch of text files.

I even have the original Perl script from Ward, I deployed a skunkworks Wiki at a client eons ago using it.

Still running Apache 2.0.x as well; looks like it could just be a server going down/offline due to bitrot? There were a lot of great discussions in that wiki, hope it comes back up (though it's in the wayback machine, at least).

> though it's in the wayback machine, at least

We're going to see this more and more over the next decade. If you aren't yet, please become a sustaining member of the Internet Archive[0]. If you want to try Mozilla's new addon that automatically fetches the most recent saved page from the Wayback Machine, install No More 404s[1].

[0] https://archive.org/donate/

[1] https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/no-more-404s

[1] This is how the page loads for me with No More 404s: http://i.imgur.com/DyyRDZR.png

> We're going to see this more and more over the next decade.

The same thing is happening with torrenting because of the advent of streaming services. I'm not criticizing, because I think it is clearly better that artists are paid for their content. My observation is simply that people don't download if they can stream, but eventually streaming services discontinue content. And when they do, the ability to acquire that content is much reduced.

You might like Karagarga :)

Even if you want to use services like that, KG isn't by far the easiest to use, nor does it have the biggest library.

My point isn't to question how to acquire them now, my question is to what effect it might have in 10 years. Or 20?

> (though it's in the wayback machine, at least).

Yeah, better not rely on this in future. Their practice of making pages inaccessible in the archive if a future domain owner blocks the archive from crawling it means just about any content there becomes useless the minute a domain squatter takes the domain.

That's interesting, I did not know that. I'd just expected they would represent the history of the content over time with blank periods when it could not be crawled.

Could someone explain what this was?

It is the location of WikiWikiWeb, the first ever wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb

Beyond being the first wiki wiki and the model for Wikipedia, the Portland Pattern Repository was a place where many of the principles of Agile software development were hashed out through discussion of the leading members of that movement. It was closer to the discussion pages of Wikipedia, where someone would write on a topic, and another would add more dimension or a counterpoint to what was written. Instead of creating a page of what, say, Extreme Programming was, pages full of discussion of how it was implemented on site or how it could be improved were generated; when it became too large, someone might refactor that page into several different pages, such as XP Principles, XP Practices, XP implementations, and so on.

In practice, though, most of the "settled" pages ended up looking a lot like TVTropes. Basically, c2 is/was "Software Engineering Tropes."

Elsewhere on the net, there are two sites that convention mandated a warning flag for fear of clicking the rest of the afternoon following interesting things. TVTropes... and C2.

In my fork of TV Tropes, All The Tropes, I explicitly compare software patterns to entertainment tropes, as they're essentially the same thing.

It's where I learned a lot about programming.

Archive.org to the rescue:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160925063638/http://c2.com/cgi...

Would it be possible to put the whole website on IPFS?

Nooooo!

I've been trying to mirror it over the past few days, but it keeps going on and off...

Somebody contact Ward Cunningham!

Oh, so it's you! ;-)

That makes me sad. I worked of a lot of those pages there.

  wayback_machine_downloader www.c2.com -c 20

Ref: https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader

Since there's still a link to it on the home page (http://www.c2.com), this may be a temporary situation.

As of now it is up again, just noticed it personally. So no need for backups or archive.org :)

There is a backup? Right ... ?

I was trained as a developer under some of those early masters in Agile/XP. Including frequent references to that wiki. I sure hope we can reconstruct it and get it back online as soon as possible!

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