IFTF has picked up the SPAG web site

The most recent iteration of SPAG ran from 2013 to 2016. The web site (https://spagmag.org/) has been hosted by Brandon Invergo for all that time (I think).

However, that site was getting really creaky. It was a Wordpress site on Dreamhost, and half the time it showed nothing but a Wordpress error.

Recently Brandon contacted us and asked if we knew someone who could take over the site, maybe fix it up. Well, that is a thing that we do, so I said yes. :)

Behold: the rebuilt, non-error-throwing SPAG web site!

You can compare it to the old site (Wayback snapshot circa 2019).

If you spot any errors, please let me know!

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Notes:

This is now a static web site running on an IFTF server. So it should stay up forever with no maintenance. I tried to keep all URLs the same, so old links to spagmag.org should still work. Even older links to www.sparkynet.com/spag should still redirect, but we don’t own that domain so they may break someday.

The “original run” of SPAG (issues 1 through 60) still have their original formatting. (In all its Mosaic-era glory!) I made very few changes to these files:

  • I went through and made sure all the HTML files were correctly-encoded UTF-8, with Unix-style line breaks.
  • I changed IFDB and IF Archive links to point to the modern URLs for those services.
  • I removed Google Analytics scripts.
  • I added a footer saying “historical archive maintained by IFTF”.

The “new run” (issues 61 through 64) have been reformatted as single pages: http://spagmag.org/issue-64/, etc. I stayed close to the circa-2013 Wordpress theme, but I cleaned up the format a bit.

I imported the Wordpress comments for issues 61-64. (Except I nuked the spam comments, of which there were quite a few.) Comments are of course now baked into the site, since it’s all static HTML now. Please consider comment threads to be locked henceforth. :)

Note that the SPAG review index still exists, but it has not been updated to include issues 61-64.

Licensing: The old web site says “SPAG is published under the CC BY-NC-ND Licence. Please contact us if you would like to republish an article with its images, as they are not covered under this licence.” I would like to copy in that comment, but I’m not sure if it applies to issues 1-60 or only 61-64. Anybody know?

What if someone wants to revive SPAG? I dunno. I don’t think anybody’s made a peep about it since 2016, but I could be wrong. If someone is seriously interested, they should contact us and we’ll talk about it.

What if someone emails SPAG? The contact address on the recent issues is spag.mag.if@gmail.com. I didn’t try to change that, and I don’t know who reads that inbox. Possibly Katherine Morayati. More likely nobody.

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Brilliant work! This is great to have around. Is there a way I could go about helping get issues 61-64 into the review index? Is it just a matter of formatting the reviews from those issues properly?

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Yeah, you’d have to reformat the articles into the review page format, which is mostly-plain-text (but actually HTML with links – this isn’t a tidy setup). And then update the authors.html, reviewers.html, and LETTER.html files to link to them.

I have a github repository at GitHub - iftechfoundation/spagmag: Source for SPAG archive static web site . We can use that for coordinating updates. By all means add a pull request for the reviews, if you are up for it.

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Well done, Zarf !!

Congrats and

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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I’m especially grateful for the URL consistency. SPAG is quoted five times in the German Wikipedia and I didn’t have to change a single link.

I’ve updated the page footers to say

All articles and reviews are copyright by their original authors.

I’ve also marked the text (not images) of issues 61-64 as being licensed CC BY-NC-ND. That matches how the previous site was set up. Older issues had no explicit license.

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Could the very first paragraph be fixed? It has this:

and the preservation and furthering of the art of Interctive Fiction

Zarf, there’s a major issue in the archival copy in the IF archive:

As is now, has absolute links, absolute from the most wrong place in a *nix filesystem rendering not only useless, but perhaps also outright dangerous, a local browsing (file://).

sorry for the public disclosure, but seems that Zarf has disabled the sending of PM…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

Thanks, typo fixed.

I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you mean. Are you talking about the fact that the front page has links like this?

<a href="/issue-64">Issue 64</a>

That’s the way the web site is. The archived files are saved as a backup; I’m not really concerned for how they present as file: URLs.

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Yes, I mean the links starting with /
IMVHO is an huge no-no in the context of file: browser navigation (look at the home anchor in index.htm for the most problematic one)

I think that the issue can be solved with an appropriate perl/sed/awk/whatever script which turns the initial / into ./ and packaging into an alternate archive file.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

There’s already scripts in there, and they don’t need to be any more complicated.

I used to build web sites with all relative links and it was a bad tradeoff. It complicates the setup and it doesn’t make testing, deployment, or backup any easier. Absolute (but server-relative) is the way to go.

If you want to look at a bunch of files locally, type python3 -m http.server 8001 -d htdocs and get on with it. Running off file: cause security failures anyhow; I gave it up.

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Yeah, I believe file:// is generally deprecated nowadays; it just causes way more problems than it solves. These are web pages, meant to be served by a web server; if you want to use them locally, a temporary local server like zarf suggests is the better way.

file: is okay for single file sites with everything embedded, but a major pain for anything else. Luckily local webservers are very easy to run!

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after 2 hours, still figuring how to coax apache to grok those absolute references (/ leads back to my homepage, and all other links ends in 404…

oh, well. At least the mess don’t have screwed my localhost. let’s put the trouble in the backburner and call the day for now.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

The society for promotion and preservation that couldn’t promote or preserve itself.

Well, the name dates back to the mid 90’s, when there was a real question about whether text games would long survive their demise as a commercial concern; when it shuttered in 2016 the amateur scene was in rude health and preservation was no longer as much a need. I will say, though, that when we launched the Rosebush, one of the explicit goals was to create a place for some of the longer-form pieces that used to run in SPAG, but didn’t have a natural home once it shut down. So if reading the archive makes anything nostalgic for those kinds of essays, send us a pitch!

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Mike, honestly, back in the SPAG days I liked more the reviews than the “pieces” (I guess that for this you means “articles, interviews and essays”)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.