[R] Proposal: Archive UseR conference presentations at www.r-project.org/useR-yyyy

[Friedrich Leisch]

>>>>> On Mon, 24 Sep 2007 09:25:27 -0500,
>>>>> hadley wickham (hw) wrote:

  >> I think I like Hadley's proposal of collecting conference webpages
  >> (after the conference is over) to one of our servers
  >> better. Redirecting to pages at different locations is dangerous when
  >> people move on to new positions.

  > That wasn't my suggestion,

Sorry, my mistake. I was wading through several hundred emails
yesterday after an offline period ... makes your brain go numb rather
quickly.

  > but I can understand your desire to do
  > that.  Perhaps just taking a static snapshot using something like
  > wget, and hosting that on the R-project website would be a good
  > compromise.

Hmm, wouldn't it be easier if the hosting institution would make a tgz
file? wget over HTTP is rather bad in resolving links etc

we could include a note on the top page that this is only a snapshot
copy and have a link to the original site (in case something changes
there).

  >> E.g., I currently have the "problem" that since both Kurt and myself
  >> are no longer at TU Wien, we cannot guarantee how long
  >> www.ci.tuwien.ac.at will be up and running, and we were talking last
  >> week about moving the old DSC webpages to the server at WU running
  >> www.R-project.org.

  > Yes, this is why I prefer to host all of my sites on an external host.

  >> So it would make a lot of sense to me to collect old conference pages
  >> to a central location under the www.R-project.org umbrella. During the
  >> active phase of a conference it is certainly better to have them on
  >> a server under control of the local organizing committee.

  > The one problem is setting up a redirect so that existing links and
  > google searches aren't broken.  This would need to be put in place at
  > least 6 months before the old website closed.

Yes, very good point, I didn't think about that. But the R site is
searched very often, so material there appears rather quickly on
Google searches. Ad bookmarks: I don't want to remove the old site,
just have an archive copy at a central location.

.f