1199848 - archive Mozilla Labs website

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Websites :: mozillalabs.com, defect)

Description

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Per https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla-labs/YovGlCnhwgg:

Mozilla Labs is defunct, and it has been for a while. The last post to its blog was in 2013.  We should archive the website so we stop misleading people about its status.

Let's put a message on the website explaining the current status of Mozilla Labs.  I would still leave the existing content on the site, so no content would disappear. It would just be clear that Mozilla Labs is no longer in operation.

Who has the keys to this particular kingdom?

Comment 1

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Hi Laura, https://wiki.mozilla.org/Modules/All#Mozilla_Websites says you're the module owner for Mozilla Websites!  How can I put a message on the Mozilla Labs website that explains the status of Mozilla Labs?

Comment 2

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Update: I chatted with pmac and bensternthal on IRC, and they directed me to the source code repo, for which I've requested a pull to put a note at the top of every page of the site <https://github.com/mozilla/betafarm/pull/81>.

But they also suggested that we properly archive the site, so we don't need to keep Django up-to-date.  bensternthal is going to look for someone to take that on.

Comment 3

[Ben (:bensternthal)]

FYI. This is in my backlog, it's going to be a low priority but I think we can create a static version of the site and archive somewhere.

Comment 4

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Ben: as an experiment, I downloaded a copy of the site with wget:

wget -P /Users/myk/mozillalabs.com/ -mpck --user-agent="" -e robots=off --wait 1 -E https://mozillalabs.com/

And pushed it to the gh-pages branch of my betafarm fork, to publish it to GitHub Pages:

http://mykmelez.github.io/betafarm/

Clicking around the site seems to work, and the W3C Link Checker doesn't report any problems with the pages on the archive site itself (although there are a few bad references to pages on other sites):

https://validator.w3.org/checklink?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fmykmelez.github.io%2Fbetafarm%2F&hide_type=all&depth=&check=Check

Would something like that be an adequate solution?

Obviously we'd still need to add the archive notice to the top of every page.  And the archive would live somewhere other than my personal fork, perhaps on a gh-pages branch of the mozilla/betafarm repo (which would put it at http://mozilla.github.io/betafarm/).

Since GitHub Pages supports custom domains, so we could point mozillalabs.com to that site.  But SSL support might be tricky.  Some folks do it with CloudFlare, per https://www.benburwell.com/posts/configuring-cloudflare-universal-ssl/, but I'm not sure if that approach would work well in this case.

Comment 5

[Ben (:bensternthal)]

From my perspective this works fine. I think next steps here are:

1. Feel free to add something about the site being archived to the static site.
2. I do not see the need to have https on this since it's an archive and static.
3. I think we just request a dns change from webops to point the domain to your static site.
4. We put in a bug to decom the current site.

I think you are unblocked.

Comment 6

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

(In reply to Ben (:bensternthal) from comment #5)
> From my perspective this works fine. I think next steps here are:
> 
> 1. Feel free to add something about the site being archived to the static
> site.

Ok, I've added the header note in my original pull request <https://github.com/mykmelez/betafarm/pull/1> to every page of the site:

        <p class="container" style="width: 876px; padding: 10px; border: 1px solid #FF9999; margin-bottom: 10px; background: #FFFF99; color: black; font-size: 1.5em;">
         Mozilla Labs is no longer active, so this website has been archived,
         and the information on it is no longer reliable.  For more information
         about Mozilla, see
         <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/">Mozilla's main website</a>.
       </p>


> 2. I do not see the need to have https on this since it's an archive and
> static.

Woot!

I created the mozilla/mozillalabs.com repository to host the archived site:

  https://github.com/mozilla/mozillalabs.com

And I pushed the archived site to its gh-pages branch, which published it on GitHub Pages:

  http://mozilla.github.io/mozillalabs.com/


> 3. I think we just request a dns change from webops to point the domain to
> your static site.
> 4. We put in a bug to decom the current site.

Can you tackle these two changes?

Comment 7

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

(In reply to Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez] from comment #6)
> Ok, I've added the header note in my original pull request

Erm, the correct URL for this pull request is <https://github.com/mozilla/betafarm/pull/81>.

Comment 8

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Now that DNS has been updated, the site archival is complete.  Thanks, Ben, for your help!