I've been keeping people on the new VAMWorld discussion board updated with what's going on regarding the sun setting on Wikispaces and the migration of VAMWorld, but I figured I should update people that use the wiki, but not the discussion board. For those that don't know, Wikispaces, the platform that has hosted VAMWorld for 12 years, is going away at the end of September. I've been moving things to a new platform. The discussion board is already up, using a phpBB-based forum. It's linked from the old VAMWorld site, or is directly accessible with a temporary URL vwtest.varslab.com. The VAMWorld wiki, which comprises about 8000 pages of stuff people have added to VAMWorld, now needs to be moved. I just locked it for editing and downloaded all the pages. Next step is that I have to download all the images stored there that are linked from the pages. I'm estimating a total of 16 GB of data I have to download, and I hope to do this tonight. The new wiki will be based on the MediaWiki platform, so it will look and behave a lot like Wikispaces, which also uses MediaWiki. I've developed some Python scripts to convert the Wikispaces format of the downloaded pages to Mediawiki, and after a bit of testing, it appears that it will work 99% of the time. The other 1% will probably give us some broken links or funny formatting, but that's resolvable on a page-by-page basis as the problems are discovered. (No, I will not be proof-reading all 8000 pages.) After I import all the pages, I'll have to import all the images. If everything seems to be working after that, the last step will be transferring the vamworld.com domain. My goal is to have this done by the time I leave for the ANA show next Wednesday. Wish me luck.
Sounds to me like you've got your hands full John ! I guess it's kind of the nature of the internet though - websites come and websites go. Some do it more quickly than others, some only after many, many years. But I commend you for your effort to maintain continuity !
