Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
History is littered with hundreds of conflicts over the future of a community, group, location or business that were "resolved" when one of the parties stepped ahead and destroyed what was there. With the original point of contention destroyed, the debates would fall to the wayside. Archive Team believes that by duplicated condemned data, the conversation and debate can continue, as well as the richness and insight gained by keeping the materials. Our projects have ranged in size from a single volunteer downloading the data to a small-but-critical site, to over 100 volunteers stepping forward to acquire terabytes of user-created data to save for future generations.
The main site for Archive Team is at archiveteam.org and contains up to the date information on various projects, manifestos, plans and walkthroughs.
This collection contains the output of many Archive Team projects, both ongoing and completed. Thanks to the generous providing of disk space by the Internet Archive, multi-terabyte datasets can be made available, as well as in use by the Wayback Machine, providing a path back to lost websites and work.
Our collection has grown to the point of having sub-collections for the type of data we acquire. If you are seeking to browse the contents of these collections, the Wayback Machine is the best first stop. Otherwise, you are free to dig into the stacks to see what you may find.
The Archive Team Panic Downloads are full pulldowns of currently extant websites, meant to serve as emergency backups for needed sites that are in danger of closing, or which will be missed dearly if suddenly lost due to hard drive crashes or server failures.
To use ArchiveBot, drop by #archivebot on EFNet. To interact with ArchiveBot, you issue commands by typing it into the channel. Note you will need channel operator permissions in order to issue archiving jobs. The dashboard shows the sites being downloaded currently.
There is a dashboard running for the archivebot process at http://www.archivebot.com.
ArchiveBot's source code can be found at https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/ArchiveBot.
There used to be an embedded REPL here, but apparently github doesn’t allow embedding scripts or swfs in wiki pages anymore.
The REPL swf is here, you might need to grab its edge and drag it into place, since it was meant to be viewed at 550×400. There are also some code samples and an online las3r editor here.
What functions are available?
The repl is currenly loading all code from las3r.core.lsr.
Documented here.
Hey! This looks like Clojure!
Las3r is based on the Clojure source code, so they have a lot in common. For instance, the reader is almost a line-by-line port of the Clojure reader. So if you know the syntax of Clojure, you know the syntax of las3r.
However, las3r should not be considered a port of Clojure.
Why not?
There are some important differences. For example:
What’s something fun to try?
(def pet (let [p (new flash.display.Sprite) g (. p graphics)]
(doto g
(beginFill 0xFF0000)
(drawRect 0 0 50 50)
(endFill))
(. *stage* (addChild p)) p))
(. *stage* (addEventListener "enterFrame" (fn [e] (set! (. pet x) (+ (. pet x) 2)))))Compiler or interpreter?
Each lisp form is compiled directly to AVM2 bytecode and then loaded into the hosting swf’s application domain. This is analogous to how how Clojure compiles and dynamically loads Java compilation units.
Can you compile lisp “ahead-of-time” to a swf?
Yes! For example, the repl you see above is loading a swf that contains all the bytecode for las3r.core.
What’s it good for?
las3r is easy to embed. For example, you can drop the included las3r repl into any flash or flex application. This makes it a useful tool for runtime inspection and tweaking. Eventually, las3r should be a good language for writing Flash apps and games.
Is there an emacs mode?
Yes. las3r-mode.el is included in the source tree. Also included: basic support for sending lisp forms from emacs to Flash for evaluation.
