{"id":4729,"date":"2018-07-15T08:58:34","date_gmt":"2018-07-15T14:58:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/?p=4729"},"modified":"2021-04-05T08:14:12","modified_gmt":"2021-04-05T14:14:12","slug":"less-movable-targets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/less-movable-targets\/","title":{"rendered":"Less Movable Targets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s an update to my previous blog post<\/a>, on the volatility of web links.<\/em><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Twitter post<\/a>\u00a0has a bunch of responses, with some useful tidbits in there. Some resources mentioned:\u00a0HTML5 UP!<\/a>\u00a0for free CC templates;\u00a0gamedev.net<\/a>\u00a0has been around for almost 20 years and can act as an archive,\u00a0gamedevs.org<\/a>\u00a0keeps some old presentations around. Go three paragraphs down for some web hosting suggestions. The idea of using the archive.org link as the “real” link is clever (and a bit sad), but assumes archive.org will always be around. Note that publishers such as the ACM\u00a0allow you to put your published articles up<\/a>\u00a0on your homepage, your institution’s website, and on non-commercial repositories. I’m not sure how entities such as\u00a0ResearchGate<\/a>\u00a0(where I’ve seen a number of papers stored) fit into this picture – they appear to be for-profit, e.g., they sell\u00a0advertising<\/a>, so I don’t think they\u00a0fall into any of the ACM’s categories. I appreciate their efforts, but am concerned that papers there may go away because ResearchGate hasn’t been challenged by the ACM or others. Again, long-term durability is a question.<\/p>\n

Also see the comments after\u00a0the original\u00a0post<\/a>. My comment on “The sooner these are displaced by open publications like the JCGT, the better” is that, in graphics, there are no other free (to both readers and authors) journals, at least none that I know about. arXiv<\/a>\u00a0maybe qualifies. Looking there today, this article<\/a> seemed like a handy summary, pointing to some resources I hadn’t known of before. But,\u00a0trying to go to a site\u00a0they mention in their article, Chrome warns, “Attackers might be trying to steal your information from\u00a0dgtal.org<\/strong>” – OK, never mind. There might be great stuff at arXiv, but it seems like a firehose (10 articles published in graphics<\/a> in the last week), without serious peer review. Editorial filtering and peer review is worth a lot. I guess you might be able to use a strategy of putting your preprint at arXiv, sort of like ResearchGate but less questionable (arXiv is run by Cornell). This approach is underutilized within graphics, AFAIK: only 2 papers on our refs page<\/a> are available this way, vs. 25 for ResearchGate. If someone wants to explain what I’m missing here, great! Update:\u00a0<\/em>the ACM now permits authors to put preprints on ArXiv<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Thanks to you all for the followups, and I find my thoughts about the same: corporations come and go,\u00a0more quickly than we expect<\/a>. While I have a lot of faith in various institutions, ultimately I think the entity that best looks out for my interests is me. Having my own domain and website is\u00a0good insurance against the vagaries from change of job status, change of corporate services (or existence), and change of webmaster. Me, I’m a cheapskate:\u00a0http:\/\/erichaines.com<\/a>\u00a0is just a subdomain of realtimerendering.com, of which I’m the prime webmaster; we also host a number of other groups as subdomains, such as the\u00a0Advances in Real-Time Rendering course notes repository<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Ke-Sen’s invaluable work<\/a>\u00a0tracking conference articles – doing so costs me no time or money, as others maintain them. So another option is to share a domain and host among a bunch of people.<\/p>\n

Yes, your own website costs a little money (the price of two cups of Starbucks per month), but admit it: you pay more in a month for your smartphone and internet service provider than the yearly cost for a website. It’s a\u00a0bit of effort initially to register a domain and set up a website, but once the template and blog are in place, you’re done. Write a new article or slide set, one that took you hours or weeks to create? It’s five minutes to add it to your web page and upload it. Morgan McGuire<\/a>, Andrew Glassner<\/a>, and I<\/a> like bluehost<\/a>.\u00a0Sven Bergstr\u00f6m likes\u00a0digitalocean<\/a>\u00a0for $5\/month hosting, and gives some setup and admin tips<\/a>. His previous favorite was site5<\/a>.\u00a0Sebastian Sylvan likes\u00a0nearlyfreespeech<\/a>, which I hadn’t heard of and looks quite cheap for a personal site (like, possibly something like $3.65 a year (plus $12 per Gig stored, or maybe less – the pricing is not clear), with a free Gig download a day), assuming you’re not serving up huge files or don’t get popular; ijprest notes in the comments that Amazon’s S3 hosting<\/a>\u00a0is bare bones, just\u00a0basic hosting, but about as cheap at nearlyfreespeech and is pretty much guaranteed to outlast you.<\/p>\n

Update Nov. 2019:<\/em> A few more options, just in case.\u00a0Google Domains<\/a> and Namecheap<\/a>\u00a0are cheaper still for domain name registration, with Namecheap sounding a bit less expensive<\/a>\u00a0(but we’re talking a few dollars a year here, tops). For free hosting, Github is another interesting option<\/a>. The advantages include collaboration and automatic backup of any changes, a la Git. We use this for I3D<\/a>, for example, with the site’s elements visible to all<\/a>. For non-programmer-types there are plenty of other options<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Oh, and the presentation from 2012 I mentioned in my last post that is no longer available<\/a>\u00a0– dead link – is now available again, as Duncan Fewkes sent me a copy and Michal Valient gave me permission to host it. It’s now here<\/a>\u00a0– a few minutes work on my part.<\/p>\n

Question for the day: if Gmail and Google Docs suddenly went away, would this cause a collapse that would take us back to the 1990’s, 1950’s, or would the loss kick the world all the way back to some time in the 1800’s? Just a thought, you might want to use\u00a0Google Takeout or other backup method<\/a>\u00a0now and then. If nothing else, visiting your\u00a0Google Takeout site<\/a>\u00a0is interesting in that you see the mind-boggling number of databases Google has in your name.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s an update to my previous blog post, on the volatility of web links. The\u00a0Twitter post\u00a0has a bunch of responses, with some useful tidbits in there. Some resources mentioned:\u00a0HTML5 UP!\u00a0for free CC templates;\u00a0gamedev.net\u00a0has been around for almost 20 years and can act as an archive,\u00a0gamedevs.org\u00a0keeps some old presentations around. Go three paragraphs down for some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc","category-resources"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4729"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5490,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4729\/revisions\/5490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}