Are they gone?!?

[Minox]

Can't access their website as of this afternoon....

[Minox]

they seem up now.

[ivanw]

This has already happened. Most small sites have this latencies during maintenance periods but they are not as closely observed as this one.
Truth is that it has some extra success at disappointing this many people. Hundreds of them were actively involved as you could see from the original forum members list before they removed it.
Anyway this site will disappear sooner or later as long as it has no purpose anymore. At least we can say that while looking through the only evaluation tool in use nowadays and I'm sure you see what I mean.

[Rqyteqto]

Is there any way to download all that information in the forums?

I haven't been through all that much of it but I know there's lots and lots of good stuff that shouldn't be lost. I am pretty sure, given the lack of interaction by the original technology and website creators, once the site goes down, that's likely to be the last any of us will ever see it.

[ivanw]

I have some snapshots of a very small selection of threads pointed at by the results of some searches at the early stages of my discovering the technology.
What I know for sure is that what I will miss most will be those messages I have not read yet ( murphy has more about this )

Anyway achieving theses pages would be a nightmare. Would this be realized, how would these messages be made available through a forum server relying on some database tables. All this is possible though, you've just got a second nightmare at hand.

[The00Dustin]

There are many softwares made specifically for downloading entire web pages. One would think these softwares could be used to point at forums.fingerworks.com, and collect all of the data. One would also think that it would be fairly easy to past said downloads elsewhere, albeit not necessarily integrated into another forum. However, it would probably have been a lot better to have come to this realisation before the administrators of the forum took down a large portion of the links. Anyway, I don't really know which softwares would be best for doing this, just that they exist. Someone should look into it and save our sorry tails.

[Rqyteqto]

Well, it is possible to save the pages as HTML files with Firefox. I've started in on saving pages. It will take a while, but a half dozen a day and in a few months, I should make a fairly sizeable dent.

I suppose the materials are copyrighted or something. I hope not but in that case, I will have only saved them temporarily, for viewing off line. I promise. I absolutely swear I will have no permanent files of this material.

[VaderPi]

You should use Scrapbook instead. It will go much faster. And it does a better job than Firefox's built-in page save support. I use it all the time, but I never thought to try it on the FingerWorks forum. I'll have to try this when I get home. I doubt that my employer will appreciate the surge in bandwidth usage.

[scratch]

You can also use "wget -r" to recursively download the whole site. wget is a free command available on Linux and Cygwin, and probably also for OSX.

[TorbenGB]

Update: this has been made obsolete, so don't worry that it isn't complete.

If nobody else is doing this, I have started to Scrapbook all threads of the forum. Here's my current Scrapbook progress, and I will update this entry as I go along. for some reason I started from the bottom. Oh well.

Code: Select all

Product Comments
   TouchStream Keyboards pg1
   TouchStream Keyboards pg2
   TouchStream Keyboards pg3
   TouchStream Keyboards pg4
   TouchStream Keyboards pg5
   TouchStream Keyboards pg6
   TouchStream Keyboards pg7
   TouchStream Keyboards pg8
   TouchStream Keyboards pg9
   TouchStream Keyboards pg10
   TouchStream Keyboards pg11
   TouchStream Keyboards pg12
   TouchStream Keyboards pg13
   TouchStream Keyboards pg14
   TouchStream Keyboards pg15
   TouchStream Keyboards pg16
+   iGesture Products pg1
+   iGesture Products pg2
+   iGesture Products pg3
General Usage
+   Typing and Layouts pg1
+   Typing and Layouts pg2
+   Typing and Layouts pg3
+   Typing and Layouts pg4
+   Mousing and Gesturing pg1
+   Mousing and Gesturing pg2
+   Mousing and Gesturing pg3
+   Mousing and Gesturing pg4
+   Mousing and Gesturing pg5
+   Ergonomics
Product Troubleshooting
+   Installation and Diagnostics pg1
+   Installation and Diagnostics pg2
+   Installation and Diagnostics pg3
MultiTouch Utilities
+   MyGesture Editor pg1
+   MyGesture Editor pg2
+   MyGesture Editor pg3
+   MyGesture Editor pg4
+   MyGesture Editor pg5
+   MyGesture Editor pg6
+   Firmware Upgrader and Feature Selector
+   Finger Tracking & Hand Motion SDKs
+   XWinder pg1
+   XWinder pg2
+   Utility Installation issues
Application Gesture Sets
+   2D Graphics & Web Tools
+   3D Animation/CAD Tools
+   Programmers' Editors
+   Linux Apps
+   Mac OS X Apps
+   Windows Apps

"+" means that I've Scrapbook'ed all threads in that topic.

(When I'm done with this singularly repetitive exercise I am probably the only person who can claim to have seen all FW posts...)

[Rqyteqto]

Wow!

I hope I speak for all, THANKS!!!!

This is an invaluable resource and now its saved. I hope you also have it saved somewhere safe beyond the fingers of destruction.

I'd be more than happy to keep a copy, I have several spare external drives, everything from 6 GB to 160 GB that can be available. I'd also be willing, if its possible, to burn it to Disk and keep those.

Thanks again Torben, du er een myet dejlige mann.

[ivanw]

Wow!

I hope I speak for all, THANKS!!!!

+1

[TorbenGB]

Thanks for the back-patting, folks. That's just what I needed to see in order to finish this work.

I have toyed more with Scrapbook and found in it a method that is even better than what I had started, so the OldThreads page will be replaced with the Scrapbook output once it is complete. Here's a first peek: archive/tree/frame.html

Ten points go to VaderPi for mentioning this nifty tool! Oh, and Rqyteqto, did you get that remark from a female Norwegian friend? Thanks all the same

[Rqyteqto]

Well, close, my mom was Danske, from Faaborg on Fyn. I used to talle danske fairly well, at least for a teenager. Unfortunately, that was a long time ago, my mom is at Valhalla and I haven't have much cause to speak the language in years.

[TorbenGB]

Whew, that was a lot of work. Now (currently uploading!) the archive contains everything except the largest forum, "TouchStream Keyboards", which contains 16 pages (400 threads)! Those are undoubtedly also very interesting, so I will have to make that effort sooner or later -- and sooner is better...

I would recommend that real Fingerfans read some of the old threads (again). I have come across many interesting details, and we would be well off to remember some of those tips and tricks that were documented in that old forum.

As a sidenote, it's great to see that the Fingerfans forums have attracted more than 150 members already. I'm very pleased to see that the efforts to create this fansite was far from wasted. (The FW forums had 785 members at the end.)

[ivanw]

Torben, my son John, who has become a geek in the PHP/forums realm, has seen what you are doing here. He could not help coming with his own solution. I know that it is a bit late to contribute, as it is obvious that you had a hard time to get the job done this far , but I must admit that what he as in mind looks great too!

Yesterday evening, he wrote a PHP sniffer-script that is currently filtering all the FWSF pages hierarchy along with the attached images and files. Theses pages anchors get altered in such a way that their reference is remapped to each new target location and the links related to the dead forum, which have to become inoperative, get grayed out to make them look dead indeed. Mostly all other links will hit their target. And here comes the most handy part: seamless forum-like navigation, as long as all index pages get properly restored along the way.

The result should hopefully provide a simple huge bunch of files that would allow us to navigate the original hierarchy. Only some accessory navigation anchors would be grayed out along with those dealing with member management. The process is still in progress and I don't know yet what it will provide at the end. It just looks good for the moment.

I don't say that you should postpone what you have planned but I'll have more on this at the end of the day. I think that both efforts should be considered worthwhile. I wanted to tell you that if you stumble upon some overwhelming task ahead, you should know that some alternative may bring another way around the issue.

Will remain to provide for some solution to the MISSING search tool issue...
wanted there <img src=http://www.gigablast.com/images/icon_toolbar-over.jpg alt="Someone knows about alternatives?">

[TorbenGB]

Sounds great. I'm sending you an e-mail so we can work on this directly.

[TorbenGB]

With regard to the Gigablast search engine you mentioned, there is also the option to use Google with a code to search only a specified URL.

Example: Googling for "site:forums.fingerworks.com/showthread.php wiggle" gives this result:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Af ... php+wiggle
and we should be able to build a Google search form into our archive pages so that a search would run on either "forums.fingerworks.com" or perhaps even "archive.fingerfans.dreamhosters.com"...

[ivanw]

An equivalent query form to address Google search engine would be:

Code: Select all

<form action="http://www.google.fr/search" name="f" target="FFGoogle"
 onsubmit="q.value=myq.value+' site:fingerfans.dreamhosters.com';"; >
 <input type="hidden" name="q">
 <input type="submit" value="Google" border="0">
 <input name="myq"    value="">
</form>

Torben, in the archive index we have to replace the dummy domain parameter www.mydomain.com.
It is only a place-holder for the Gigablast query field that should be fingerfans.dreamhosters.com.

As to decide which search engine is best for a free site search, look at this:

• A site search query with Google search (896 results)
• The same query with Gigablast (1794 results)

This is from the site my son John is in charge from. The Gigablast search is led to a dedicated sub-domain to narrow the search to a subset of the whole.

[VaderPi]

Torben,

Have you tried using Scrapbook's indepth capture? It should grab all of the forum posts by just setting depth to 3 on forums.fingerworks.com. I just tried it, but I did not let if finish. After a few seconds there were about 100 pages in the capture queue.

[TorbenGB]

Have you tried using Scrapbook's indepth capture?

I have actually uninstalled Scrapbook now because the archive is complete (and I don't have any other use for Scrapbook).

[ivanw]

Torben, either I have missed something, or you did not advertise enough about the availability of the captured pages from the former forum.

If you did not do more than mentioning the link "the archive" in you third message in this thread (Thu, 10 Nov 2005 22:16), most people will miss the event as it leads to the results from the first attempt.

Don't you think we should make an entry in the index page of this forum? It would even be a good thing to highlight it for a while as a new feature, this could have the side effect of getting some feedback and advices from others.

[TorbenGB]

You're absolutely right - we should advertise this more now that it's complete and looking so nice. I've put up this sticky topic, and we also have linked to it from the Fingerfans homepage.