Dead Homer Society

12 Responses to “Quote of the Day”

1. 1 Bleeding Gums Murphy

   6 September 2017 at 10:44 am

   This is offtopic, but I’m sad there’s no offline mirror of this site. Years ago I learned a lot from your Compare and Contrast, Behind Us Forever and Crazy Notes , and I still ocassionally re-read them (in fact I’m re-reading the Crazy Notes these days). And there’s also many blog updates that doesn’t fall in any category but they’re still very insightful.

   I would be devastated if this website dissapears one day, which is why I ask if there’s a way WordPress can let you make an offline copy.
   • 2 Victor D

     6 September 2017 at 2:52 pm

     Not sure if WordPress allows download of all the blog posts one has made on a site, but in any case, a somewhat-messier alternative would be to use Internet Archive to save every page on this site. Also, since this site is essentially a WordPress site, you could always access it again via deadhomersociety.wordpress.com should the main domain go down.
     • 3 Bleeding Gums Murphy

       6 September 2017 at 3:37 pm

       I thought about Internet Archive, but that would preserve the comments as well, and while I understand this is a public blog I’m worried about privacy/consent. The blog entries, on the other hand, would only require the consent of Charlie, Dave, Mad Jon and the occasional unpaid guest.
       • 4 Victor D

         7 September 2017 at 2:38 am

         “I thought about Internet Archive, but that would preserve the comments as well, and while I understand this is a public blog I’m worried about privacy/consent.”

         Dude, no offense, but you are waaaay overthinking this. Regarding consent, the IA sure as hell doesn’t consent anybody before saving copies of websites with their own or others’ crawlers. They only take the site copies down when site owners request that they do so, hence why sometimes you’ll see results for sites given as “Sorry. This website has been excluded from the Internet Archive.”

         Besides, I highly doubt any commentors left any compromising info of any importance here on the site, honestly…
         • 5 Bleeding Gums Murphy

           7 September 2017 at 10:56 am

           Actually, the IA bots respected robots.txt files for a long time, which made several websites unavailable for being archived. It seems that’s no longer the case since April.

           And sorry, I prefer to respect consent that much.
           • 6 Victor D

             8 September 2017 at 5:03 am

             With all due respect, I disagree. If any user in the past has posted certain info that they now want removed, then that is fine, but the onus is still on them to make that request. And even if you wanted to ask permission from everyone on the site who’s ever commented, that would be a daunting and time-consuming task for all parties involved. The fact that they posted their comments publicly in the first place should be OK enough, should the need arise for Charlie and co. to suddenly pack up ship and haul it all to another site (though I doubt they’d port the comments over anyways).

             And FYI, there’s evidence[1][2] that IA and other affiliates (e.g. Alexa, freelance users) still archive sites even with robots.txt active. Yes they don’t allow access to some sites with robots.txt, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t still archive the content regardless.

             [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7967038
             [2]http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt (Note: these guys aren’t affiliated with IA in any official manner.)

             BTW, in regards to your original question, WordPress does allow export/backup of the content of an owner’s site: https://en.support.wordpress.com/export/
             • 7 Bleeding Gums Murphy

               8 September 2017 at 10:01 am

               Archive Team is not the Internet Archive:

               http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Internet_Archive

               “Let us clarify once again: ArchiveTeam is not the Internet Archive. This “backing up the Internet Archive” project, just like all the other website-rescuing ArchiveTeam projects are not ordered, asked for, organized or supported by the Internet Archive, nor are the ArchiveTeam members the employees of the Internet Archive (except a few ones). Besides accepting – and, in this case, providing – the content, the Internet Archive doesn’t collaborate with the ArchiveTeam.”

               I also said IA has stopped honoring robots.txt since April. I can’t see the first link btw.

               And no, I’n not gonna change my position. Even on FB I ask permission to share content, no matter how everyone else assume anything that is posted on public can be shared. That’s the way I am.
       • 8 Anonymous

         7 September 2017 at 3:11 pm

         Because I’m weird and have had a lot of good websites die on me over the years, some that were never archived or deliberately excluded from the archives, I save individual pages I like, and I have a lot from DHS. If, Waffle God forbid, the site ever went down and Charlie and the gang couldn’t be reached or be bothered to put it back up, I would have material to help someone make a mirror, but I guess they’d have to strip out the comments manually, or just copy the article text and images and make new pages.
         • 9 Bleeding Gums Murphy

           7 September 2017 at 3:25 pm

           I like you.
2. 10 Alicia Sammon

   8 September 2017 at 12:33 am

   Didn’t Chief Wiggum work as a security guard for Mr. Burns’ germ warfare lab in the 1960s (cf. season seven’s “Mother Simpson”, or “Homer’s Mom”, whatever that episode was called that had Glenn Close as Homer’s long-lost mother who abandoned her family to be a part of the 1960s counterculture)? And he couldn’t make it to the police force because he had asthma — at least until the antibiotic cloud cured him (which is actually a mistake, as the antibiotics wouldn’t do anything for his asthma, but it would have cleared up his acne, though I’m not sure about that either), unless this was after that happened?
   • 11 Bleeding Gums Murphy

     8 September 2017 at 10:09 am

     How could the family celebrate Christmas four times before Season 12? How could Lisa be born and Bart be 2 in 1984 if the are 8 and 10 respectively in 1990? The family lose both cars at the end of “Mr. Plow” but they’re fine in the next episode, how is that posible?
     • 12 William Guiniman

       12 September 2017 at 11:49 pm

       The show needs better writers, not just Ivy League college boys who can make witty remarks about society’s ills.