Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

All Your Work Into the Dustbin of History?

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by

James A. Bacon
in

Fellow BR bloggers.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the new Bacons Rebellion -E-Zine which seems to be little more than a marketing effort for privatization of government. Only one former Zine writer is on the list — the rest are PR flaks or “anonymous” state workers, which is a cute gimmick.

However, I have tried to pull up some of my old stories from the zine and I can’t. Can you? Could it be that the new operators have erased all of our work from servers into the dustbin of history? All those hundreds of hours of work and dozens upon dozens of columns all gone?

If so, this is truly awful.

Let me know if you can pull up your pieces. If you can’t I think we need to start a campaign with Jim Bacon to fix this.

Peter Galuszka

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12 responses to “All Your Work Into the Dustbin of History?”

  1. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Check under the archive tab – it says they are in the process of uploading the archives to the server, but all articles are available at the static Bacon’s Rebellion site.

  2. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Check under the archive tab – it says they are in the process of uploading the archives to the server, but all articles are available at the static Bacon’s Rebellion site.

  3. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Anonymous,
    I hope you’re right. For now, I can’t click on to anything.
    Peter Galuszka

  4. fadum Avatar
    fadum

    please check this excellents links. it has variety of topics.

    http://www.fiec.espol.edu.ec

    http://www.cib.espol.edu.ec/bivir/busqueda_catalogo.asp?topico=tesis

  5. Norman Leahy Avatar
    Norman Leahy

    Peter,

    The static site does load, but clicking on your profile leads to a “404” page. Or at least that’s what happened in my case. I’ll put this down to a switch to new servers, or whatnot.

    But as soon as they are available, I’d suggest downloading them immediately.

  6. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Norman,
    I will do what you suggest.

    There’s a bigger problem. we may not have the work available one click away online anymore. I am sure your work like much of the rest of ours has been tracked by other groups across the country. It is easy for them to do so if it remains on a server.
    Example: A year ago, my daughter and I spent two days traveling to Southwest Virginia to report on a coal-fired power plant. We did the story just for the hell of it. Luckily, it was picked up by sites across the country including one called the “dailyyonder.com” dedicated to rural issues. This won’t happen if the Thomas Jefferson People somehow erase our work or make it unavailable electronically.
    I’m not sure Jim Bacon thought this through when it gave the site to these people.

    Peter Galuszka

  7. Larry G Avatar
    Larry G

    There are at least two others who frequent here that have blogs … and I wouldn’t want to speak for them but they might agree to host the archive.

  8. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Peter:

    This is a moving, evolving target.

    Last time I looked you could go to ‘Archives’ on the new site and then go to the ‘static verision’ and search by date or author via Wonk Profile.

    As Norman suggests download soon because this may go away soon. Each of the old columns seems, for now, to have seperate page address … br.com/issues 08 / date … but this may change.

    Hopefully Mr. Bacon will wake up and realize his years of work and the work of all you columnists who volunteer has been sold down the river for a mess of potage.

    TJI should start their own site and leave Bacon out of it.

    To pretent this is the old BR we have been reading is fraud.

  9. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    The Thomas Jefferson Institute (TJI) provides this explanation: “We are currently in the process of uploading our archives into our new content management system. In the meantime please visit a static version> of the original Bacon’s Rebellion website to read old articles.”

    The “static version” leads to the old table of contents, with links to all the old columns. I had no trouble accessing Peter’s columns. The HTML is kind of a mess right now, so it’s not a pretty sight, but I am confident that will be fixed.

    In my agreement with TJI to take over the Bacon’s Rebellion website and e-zine, I did give them leeway to redesign the web site. I feel certain that TJI will respect all the old content that I posted during my tenure as publisher. Just to be sure, I have asked TJI for an explanation of what their plans are for reformatting the archives. I’ll keep you posted.

  10. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Jim,
    The point is that outsiders who want to access our earlier columns can do so with a mouse click. They are not going to know to go to some “static” site.
    It would be a travesty if the Thomas Jefferson people’s “redesign” prevents this from happening.

    Peter Galuszka

  11. Kiel Stone Avatar
    Kiel Stone

    The Thomas Jefferson Institute has no intention of consigning anything that was published during Jim’s tenure of Bacon’s Rebellion to the “dustbin of history.” The archives from Jim’s six year run at Bacon’s are a treasure trove of information.

    All of the articles that were published are still on the site at their old links. The static version of the old site will remain up for the duration of the time we are responsible for Bacon’s Rebellion to ensure the incoming links don’t break and people are still able to find old posts if they have the address for them.

    What we do plan to do as we move forward with the re-launched Bacon’s Rebellion is to move the content from the old site into the database for the new one. The new content management system is significantly more powerful. It allows users to sort through articles by category, author or date, as well as incorporating full text search of all the articles. Unfortunately, migrating articles to the database is a time consuming process that has to be done one at a time.

    Until we have uploaded all of the archives from Jim’s time as publisher we will maintain a link to the old archives section, where you can find every article that Jim published. Once everything is uploaded the easiest way to find articles will be to search for them in the new database. The articles will have a new URL but will be otherwise untouched. We will maintain a version of every article at their original URL as well, to make sure nothing gets lost.

    Kiel Stone
    Editor, Bacon’s Rebellion

  12. E M Risse Avatar
    E M Risse

    Mr. Stone:

    This does NOT answer Peters question, nor our concern.

    EMR just received a newsletter from U of M Math Club sent to hundreds of alumni.

    In it the editor does a nice job recalling our work there and since. He had read over some of our work and suggests readers check out our BR columns at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com/wonks_Risse.php

    That is now a dead link.

    That makes a lot of folks look like fools including you, thanks to your attempt to use BRs’ good name.

    That is not what Jim Bacon promised in exchange for our years of work.

    EMR

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