Hi Gang,
This will mainly appeal to those who took part in RTL in 2008 (an 800km 5-day race), but is relevant to all. I just noticed that RideTheLobster.com is now for sale, and the content is no longer available (except via Internet Archive).
Questions:
Does anyone know if there is a mirror site hosting the RTL site?
I think it would be good to have the content permanently hosted somewhere, perhaps as a subdomain of someone’s site (e.g., rtl.yourdomain.com). Is anyone in a good position to do that? It is relatively small space and low traffic.
This was one of the most epic unicycle racing events (so far) and it’s record should be live somewhere to promote the sport.
I agree but am not in a position to do it. Hopefully someone will step up and do it. Or at least it would have been good if someone took a screenshot of every page.
Just a little update: I checked and found this blog: https://ridethelobster.wordpress.com/page/2/. Is that the information you were referring to? And is it you who hosts it? I think a wordpress blog is a very goof solution, and it was a truly impressive ride!
Check with Nathan Hoover and Andy Cotter. They can probably connect you to whoever built the site.
Yes, it was a great reference, and a great event. Nothing like it has ever been done before or since. This was why it was so important to me to be a part of it; I was pretty sure it wasn’t the kind of thing that would happen every year. Too complicated and expensive to put on!
I think it’s still the longest and most complex unicycle racing event that’s ever been done. And what an amazingly nice place to do it! The people of Nova Scotia are so friendly and hospitable. One day Jacquie and I will go back there and actually see the place. The racing basically took up 100% of our time there, so we saw very little outside of the route itself, and the venues where we ate and slept.
I just had a look around and found this list of prices to buy a domain name. If you get access to the files, you can just upload them on a new domain, right?
I really regret not having taken part in the race, but I’m happy to see that the memory stays with so many of you. If there ever is a similar event, I’ll be sure to be there!
For what it’s worth, there are plenty of free hosts out there that support PHP and MySQL databases. The only real cost would be the domain, which once you control you just need to point the nameservers at your free host. I’ve run a number of websites that cost me about $8 a year in terms of full upkeep cost.
Old websites can be saved and duplicated with something like the Wayback Machine and HTTrack (usually with a bit of HTML tweaking to fix a few issues) and at that point it’s just as simple as writing a new PHP backend to handle any of your database work. Or you could just use existing plugins, but that’s boring.
I deal with digital preservation in my job and we use Archive-It which is a service of the Internet Archive. I’ve wondered about using it to make a comprehensive digital collection of unicycle history including the news group, the unicyclist.com forums, the Facebook groups, past websites for regional, national, and possibly international contests and conventions, websites and official documents of organizations like the IUF and USA as well as special events like Ride the Lobster. Are there any historical societies related to unicycling (besides John Foss and Tom Holub)? The first step in this process might be to set one up. Since I’d like to see UNICONs included maybe it should be something like “World Unicycle Historical Society”. Who would be interested in setting something like this up?
Great idea, waaalrus! Though I think it would be important to keep the workload as low as possible, because we all want to spend as much time on our uni’s as possible (says the guy who is not willing to spend too much time on it;)). So I think gathering information, uploading it and adding a short account and pictures after each event would do to start with?