[NetBehaviour] Help!

[Edward Picot]

Michael and everyone -

This is scary stuff! I've just been going through my own site, checking 
to see if there's anything suspicious. I can't see anything, but it 
would be really easy to miss something, and the fact that it's safe 
today doesn't mean it's still going to be safe tomorrow.

I still use a lot of hand-written HTML on my personal site, and I feel 
as if that's comparatively safe. But then with hand-written HTML the 
risk you run is that something new is going to come along (eg. CSS or 
HTML5), a new standard to which you feel you ought to upgrade your 
pages, leaving you with a mountain of work to do (I generally only 
implement new formats on new pages: I can't bear to go back and re-write 
all the old stuff, unless it's actually going to stop working if I don't 
do something). On the other hand the Dr Hairy site is made using a 
content-management system called Concrete5, which is lovely and 
modern-looking and easy-to-use, but it was made by somebody else so I 
don't fully understand it (I don't even fully understand my own PHP code 
any more, never mind anybody else's), and it may well be vulnerable to 
attack, or become vulnerable at some point in the future.

I think we really ought to think seriously about "mirror site" or 
archiving arrangements for some of this stuff. If all the work collected 
on DVblog were to disappear it would be a terrible loss. I daresay that 
all of those videos are available elsewhere, but that particular 
selection, in that particular sequence, with those particular curatorial 
comments, represents something unique and irreplaceable.

Perhaps NetBehaviour/Furtherfield could make a bit of money for itself 
by offering some archiving facilities? I wouldn't mind forking out a few 
quid.

- Edward