Not only a labor of love, but very impressive and very, very
nostalgic!
Thank you.
Tim Selander
Tokyo, Japan
On 2015/07/13 5:28, andrewferguson500@[redacted].com[HyperCard] wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
>
> (Sorry in advance for a long message).
>
>
> Firstly I apologise for the delay in getting the HyperCard
> Pantechnicon ready. I had planned to finish it by the end of
> April, but exams and later a problem with the ‘artefacts’
> section delayed progress (more on this problem later on).
>
>
> Anyway, I am pleased to announce that I have finally managed to
> create a working PmWiki of the HyperCard Pantechnicon. It is
> live online at
http://pantechnicon.net76.net, and I have also
> put up a ZIP which contains all the PmWiki installation and files.
>
>
> A few things to note:
>
> 1.) This is not the complete Pantechnicon as it was before it
> went offline. My method of restoring the Pantechnicon involved
> downloading all the archived webpages from the Internet
> Archive, however the Internet Archive did not archive all the
> pages when the Pantechnicon was online, meaning those pages
> that were not archived are now lost. However, there is still
> around 1,000 pages that were successfully archived, and this
> results in a fairly-complete version.
>
> 2.) Most of the images are missing. Sadly, the Internet Archive
> did not make a very good job of archiving the images, and my
> method of recreating the Pantechnicon did an even less good job
> of downloading the ones that were archived.
>
>
> 3.) Some of the PmWiki markup was not generated correctly by my
> program. For instance, due to various issues text that was both
> small / bold and red is now only small / bold, without the red.
> Pretty much everything else should be OK. (I noticed that the
> link to this yahoo group as well as the HyperCard ADE group on
> the Community/YahooGroups page have turned out wrong, but I
> think this is an isolated incident.) If anyone comes across
> another issue that appears to be not isolated, please let me
> know and if it is serious enough, I will edit my program, run
> the conversion process, and reupload the entire wiki again.
>
>
> The artefacts (downloads) associated with the Pantechnicon are
> mostly complete thanks to Alain who found the original
> 'Pantechnicon.sit' which contained them. However many of the
> description pages (which contain the description, author, etc
> of the artifact) and listing pages (which contain a list of all
> the stacks / apps / handlers in a particular category along
> with a short description of each item) were not archived,
> preventing access to many of the artifacts. I could see no way
> to ‘bring back’ these lists and descriptions, so I instead
> looked for an alternative source of stacks and XCMDs with
> description files. The AOL-MHC archive that Jacque kindly made
> available a few years ago seemed to fit the bill, however many
> of the files used non-standard (to Windows) file names, and the
> archive was split into two parts, the MHC Library Project, and
> a Partial AOL backup. A simple LiveCode script solved the
> filename issue, and a month’s worth of work gave me both the
> MHC and the AOL files combined together, with almost every file
> having its own description in a separate text file.
>
>
> The plan now was to upload these stacks and XCMDs (the AOL/MHC
> archive only contains stacks and XCMDs) to the Pantechnicon,
> attempt to get some lists in various categories set-up to link
> to these newly uploaded artefacts, and then provide a basic
> list of all the handlers with a link to each one, before this
> would be finished, giving a mostly-complete Pantechnicon which
> could then be taken by others (e.g. Alain) and improved upon.
>
>
> However, just as I was about to begin writing a program to
> batch-upload these artefacts to the Pantechnicon, I realised
> that this might not be the best course of action. If I were to
> upload these artefacts, then Alain (and others) would only be
> able to work within the pre-defined structure created by
> PmWiki. However, if I did not upload the artefacts and instead
> provided the raw artefacts and description text files, it would
> be easier for Alain (and others) to integrate these into the
> “new” Pantechnicon, with a structure more appropriate to that
> of the (approx. 2500) artefacts I have extracted from the
> AOL/MHC archive. In addition other data from these description
> files could be preserved to allow features such as searching, etc…
>
>
> I have therefore decided not to upload these new artefacts, and
> instead provide a zipped folder (available on the homepage of
>
http://pantechnicon.net76.net ) There is a readme.txt that I
> have included with this zip, which tries to explain some things
> and also provides some information about any issues with
> individual artefacts in the archive. If anyone has and problems
> / questions regarding these files please let me know.
>
>
> Now, a few more things before I finish:
>
> Unfortunately another section of the artefacts - the icons -
> was not included in ‘Pantechnicon.sit’ that Alain provided and
> as a result none of them appear to be archived. Alain (or
> anyone else), do you happen to have these icons? (The original
> folder was named "Icons", and was located in 'Pan/Graphics/Icons').
>
> Another missing folder is the one that contained all the images
> and screenshots for FreeGUI. Looking at the HTML, this folder
> originally existed at:
http://ufp.uqam.ca/freegui/images . Does
> anyone have a copy of this folder?
>
> A quick note on the download: there is two versions.
> pantchnicon-images.zip contains the Pantchnicon with all the
> images that were captured (not a lot, but a few). These images
> have been directly hotlinked from the Internet Archive. This is
> probably the one you want if you want to view the Pantechnicon
> as best as it can be (it is the same version as on
>
pantechnicon.net76.net). pantechnicon-no-images.zip has been
> altered so that the paths to the images point to their correct
> relative locations. This will be useful if the two folders of
> images mentioned above are located. Both these ZIPs are the
> entire installation of PmWiki + the Pantechicon files.
>
>
> These two zips as well as the “Pantechncion AOL/MHC Archive”
> can be found on the homepage of
pantechnicon.net76.net .
>
> Anyway, I hope you have fun looking at the Pantechnicon again.
> I look forward to seeing what direction this may take in the
> future (especially with your CMS, Alain!).
>
> Regards,
>
> Andrew
>
>