I cannot express how happy I am. @mcdanlj did me and this community a great favor. As we all know G+ is slowly approaching it’s “use by date”. And I don’t trust that google will gracefully sunset G+ with static content pages to retain the years of knowledge, sweat, community we have nurtured in our corner of the interwebs. So Michael who is …lets be frank… a computer ninja, helped make a backup of this community so it can be hosted out on Gitlabs. It started with a json and image export from https://gplus-exporter.friendsplus.me , then Michael worked his magic to convert it into usable data we could host remotely.
So now even if Google gives us the old middle digit in April, we will not lose the historic record of what our group brought to the table in the history of the 3DP community. Michael, I cannot thank you enough.
Now it is not a perfect 1:1 G+ backup solution. One of the advantages with G+ was the ubiquity with which you could share. Google photo albums, youtube links, embedded post images, links to outside content. It does not all perfectly display. But DANG is it an amazing start. I have some things to learn to try and get the remainder of the videos and some other content wrapped up under the backup umbrella.
But I thought you should all know it is out there. Take a look, and if any other computer ninjas have some ideas on the remainder of the content backup… please chime in with ideas.
If you want to help archive pictures and videos from the about 160 posts that are missing pictures and videos, we can provide information on how to make a merge request to that repository that adds them.
I haven’t built any of these printers, but as I construct my own unique design inside the tronxy x5s frame I’m re-using, I’ll be glad to have this archive of useful information!
Thanks to the Friends+Me Google+Exporter author for sharing documentation with me, we now have bold, italic, and strikethrough formatting preserved in the output.
Google finally, after months of unconscionable delay, has told us: they will be deleting all the G+ content, including images and videos. Starting 2 April.
There are nearly 200 missing images/videos from this community in the backup archive. Help now if you care to save them. I’m hoping that updates to the export tool allow us to save some of the missing comments, but I’m not expecting that missing images and videos will show up automatically. See the instructions above to help, and ask if you need help following the instructions.
@mcdanlj this is great (about the italics and formatting). Once I get through some of these on site installations I have going right now I hope to dig into manually downloading the missing files unless there is another method that comes up from the group in the interim.
@Eclsnowman Maybe! We can see what they give us now, and in March (wow that’s cutting it close) we’ll see what else it gives us. But I wouldn’t count on it. It will probably work for only some of the images or videos. It is likely to give us the text of the missing comments if F+M G+E doesn’t first fix the problem with incomplete comment streams.
Unless google go out of their way to make it difficult, it won’t be tremendously hard to add code to parse that data.
The next release of F+M G+E is expected to solve the missing comment problem, as well as recognizing and fixing one of the common sources of missing images in this community! Yay!
Meanwhile, I’m also checking out the current content of a community takeout, which Google promises will improve in March (that’s cutting it close…) — it may or may not help fill in any gaps by then.
If anyone is willing to help improve the ugly formatting by experimenting with Jekyll themes, that could be nice. I don’t see one that mimics the Google+ experience, but I haven’t looked much at all.
The current takeout for a community is 99.75% useless, and it’s hard to tell what Google will see fit to release in late March, a few days before they unceremoniously pull the plug.
Meanwhile, the new F+M G+E 1.7.7 release seems to have done a good job of getting the missing comments, and also found a few (7) more pictures. That’s the good news.
Getting through all the comments showed lots more missing images. We now have 191 missing images thanks to bringing in the missing comments, and there are still 75 videos missing from the archive. It will be up to the community to fill those in.
I am liking the look and feel of wikifactory so far. Time will tell but they are building a platform for migrating G+ communities and I like the vibe I am seeing over there so far. Seems much more inline with the types of people that drew me to G+. I am not sold yet… but so far that is my front runner to move the Eustathios/HercuLien for the future posts.
