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The beginning of the end.

vlittle

Well Known Member
Last year, I sold my RV-9a to a local buyer. I provided him a thumb drive image of my builder's site. http://www.vx-aviation.com/rv-9a/

Well, after more than 1600 VAF posts, many of which link to photos on my site, I will be decommissioning it this fall. This will lead to a number of dead photo links on VAF. I did contact DR at one time about this issue, but apparently there are not enough terabytes in texas to also host pictures.

I see that a lot of knowledge is already being lost this way as third party imaging sites remove pictures and I hate to be part of the problem, but I can't perpetually support or fund my site for an aircraft I don't own.

Since Van's no longer publishes the RVator, VAF is the remaining source of tribal history for our aircraft and I fear it will gradually evaporate as image sites and personal websites go away.

So if there is anything you want to capture from my site for personal use, now is the time. None of it can be used for commercial purposes without permission.

Thanks,
 
Vern, any idea how much space would be needed for your pics? I could spare a few GB on one of my hosted VMs.

It bugs the crud out of me that any pics that were posted more than a couple of years ago (a few months in some cases) are gone, and words cannot adequately express my dislike of most of the photo hosting sites.
 
...but apparently there are not enough terabytes in texas to also host pictures.

That's a crock of course. It's just a matter of being willing to make the investment to maintain the value of this site. I've browsed many posts where the photos have disappeared because of this and it really diminishes the long term value of this site. You can buy a 16 tb NAS server for less than $1000.00 these days.
 
It won't help in Vern's situation since the URLs won't match but Google is now providing free unlimited photo storage (for images under 16 megapixel).

Unless there is a way to bulk edit VAF posts to changes all of the image URLs, moving content doesn't help unless the domain name and file paths can be preserved.

Some day all of my images will befall the same fate as Vern's.
 
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It's true there is "institutional history" being lost as several generation of builders move along.

Heck, the builder's group in the Twin Cities has morphed into a social group because everyone has finished building. With new blood come new ideas.

On the other hand, look at the changing names of the dominant posters and aside from a few folks, they're pretty different than the ones you might've seen a few years ago, which were different than the ones before that.

Technology is giving us pathways to information that we could never have hoped to obtain before.

At one time, only Dan Checkoway provided a virtual step-by-step. He left the community. The community survived as more and more people documented their builds online. With new builds, comes new solutions that eclipse old ones.

Builders will come and builders will go. Links will die. Images will break. But the venues for finding information are actually expanding, not contracting.

It's a great time to be an RV builder.
 
In addition to the cost of the storage itself, there is likely to be a much higher cost associated with the increased bandwidth usage that DR would incur were he to host photos. Because all photos here are links to files hosted elsewhere, the VAF bandwidth can be kept to a reasonable (affordable) level.

The real question is how much would it cost to host the photos AND serve them, and how could that be turned into a cost-neutral (or better) proposition for DR and all the users of VAF?
 
In addition to the cost of the storage itself, there is likely to be a much higher cost associated with the increased bandwidth usage that DR would incur were he to host photos. Because all photos here are links to files hosted elsewhere, the VAF bandwidth can be kept to a reasonable (affordable) level.

The real question is how much would it cost to host the photos AND serve them, and how could that be turned into a cost-neutral (or better) proposition for DR and all the users of VAF?

Two comments:

1. If you're not familiar with beechtalk.com, take a look. Somehow they host a site for free and allow image upload on the site so images don't die from old age. It can be done.

2. If you dynamically resize/resample photos so they adhere to size standards, you can control bandwidth. Beechtalk does this. An added benefit of this is that the giant photos linked to so many posts on this site won't break the page layout. Also with HTML 5, you can query file sizes before uploading begins so you can reject files that are too big before they eat up your bandwidth.
 
Saved...

Have you considered adding the site to the Internet Archive? http://archive.org/web/

Vern's site is already covered by the Wayback Machine in www.archive.org

Sample page here -

https://web.archive.org/web/2009103...m/rv-9a/photos/Fuselage/Fuselage_2_photos.htm

Since pages are archived as they are changed, perhaps Vern could automatically do a global edit to every page and let the Wayback Machine pick up a single capture with all pages and pictures included?

At least I think that's how archive.org works... :)
 
I've been saving the various threads once in a while. In Firefox, I left-click on a blank space and "Save Page As" is the top selection. I choose "Web Page Complete" and it saves with the photos.

Doesn't help anyone else but it's my way to guard against losing some of the good things.

Dave
 
Vern, any idea how much space would be needed for your pics? I could spare a few GB on one of my hosted VMs.

It bugs the crud out of me that any pics that were posted more than a couple of years ago (a few months in some cases) are gone, and words cannot adequately express my dislike of most of the photo hosting sites.

I think some clever IT guy could crawl the VAF Site, extract the historical linked photos and build an image server. Then, all of the posted links could be replaced with links to the new server. This would require DR's permission, of course, but it is possible to automate. Perhaps paid for by an annual fee... If you want pics, you need to subscribe.

It's actually a very big problem that is not getting any easier to resolve. BTW, it's not about my site being available in the wayback machine or another server, it's the actual links in the DIY articles on this site that will dead end. Not just my stuff, the forums are full of dead links.
 
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IMHO, Van's should be subsidizing VAF. It probably saves them $$$$ in support costs. Dynon has it's own forums. So does Vertical Power.

I choose to pay for a SmugMug account to host all of my web site photos. Only $60 a Year! You can also have them create DVD's of the Galleries and get hard copies made for little cost. This way I get to keep control of my photos, and not worry about free sites coming and going, or changing names/locations.

Although, like Vern, at some point my heirs will probably pull the plug on the web site.

[ed. Like you, I pay $20/yr for Google photo storage space (Picasa). Decades from now I'm guessing it will be gone also, or in some other form. dr]
 
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I agree with those that say VAF.net would benefit greatly from easier photo posting / archiving. I'd be willing to pay a premium to be able to more easily post photos and see the photos posted by others. I tried the PhotoBucket route based on Doug's sticky but the load time for those photos and all the **** you have to view while seeing them is very aggravating. I know Doug isn't in this for the money but, for some, the extra benefit might be worth a surcharge.

In my view, the addition of a direct photo attachment option would be great value added. Or maybe I'm just missing something! Hey, I'm kinda new!
 
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