VAMWorld is dead! Long live VAMWorld!
messydesk
Posts: 20,318 ✭✭✭✭✭
As of today, the old VAMWorld, hosted by Wikispaces since 2006, is no longer accessible. It's replacement, VAMWorld 2.0, has been live for a couple months, and the vamworld.com domain has also already been moved, such that casual users might have only noticed a slightly different look when going to the VAMWorld home page.
VAMWorld was started in mid-2006 by Rob Joyce, now Senior Advisor to the Director NSA for Cyber Security Strategy. He thought it would be easier to have a wiki for the growing VAM catalog that it would be for him to release another print edition of "Fun in 1921," which was guide to neat die breaks on 1921-D Morgan dollars. His first post to the message board was short and sweet, "Just wanted to see if anyone ever looked in the message boards. Not sure if they are something we should use for VAM discussions or not." Twelve years of activity and counting have answered that question.
The transition to the new VAMWorld was made challenging in part by Wikispaces, themselves. Admin-initiated backups never worked, so I had to resort to finding a WebDAV tool that worked well with Wikispaces so that I could download all the pages (over 8,000) and convert them to a new wiki format. After downloading the pages, I then had to crawl the downloaded pages for references to all the images that needed downloading. I think this was around 30,000 images that eventually took several hours to download. For the new wiki, the decision was to use the Mediawiki platform on an AWS compute instance (two more learning experiences for me). The Wikispaces download format wasn't compatible with the MediaWiki (the chosen platform) import format, so I had to write some code to do the conversion myself. After lots of testing and fixing conversion bugs, I was able to get the entire wiki imported onto the new platform where it is now being used and updated. It is also much faster than Wikispaces ever was.
Two weeks ago, after a few weeks of radio silence, Wikispaces came through with a surprise e-mail pointing me to a JSON database dump of the discussion board on a Google drive -- 26286 threads, over 78 MB of text (close to the amount of text in the 2015 US tax laws and regulations, as I calculated recently). It had been feared and assumed that there would be no easy way to preserve an archive of old discussions. I then crawled this database for all the images that needed to be downloaded from threads and downloaded them. 18 hours and 10 minutes later, I had all 79548 images taking up 23.6 GB on my computer. While there isn't a chosen home and format for the old threads yet, the data hasn't been lost.
I'd like to thank people who gave feedback on the new VAMWorld message board and wiki, and invite everyone to make use of the finest (or at least largest) collection of information for any US numismatic specialty on the Internet.
Keeper of the VAM Catalog • Professional Coin Imaging • Prime Number Set • World Coins in Early America • British Trade Dollars • Variety Attribution
Comments
Oh look! A link!
http://ec2-13-58-222-16.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com/wiki/Home
http://www.vamworld.com and http://forums.vamworld.com might be easier to type
Keeper of the VAM Catalog • Professional Coin Imaging • Prime Number Set • World Coins in Early America • British Trade Dollars • Variety Attribution
Thank Goodness!
Before VAM WORLD and computers, we were in the "Stone Age!"
The old Vamworld environment was not a user friendly place, to be sure. Glad they move to a traditional wiki.
Vamming is one of my favorite things to do when I buy Morgan's. Vamworld is a great reference when trying to figure out exactly what Vam number you have.
This is great news!
Use the site everyday......could not do without.
bob
Good to have removed the red bar that looked like a "do not enter" sign.
Everyone involved should be patting themselves on the back for the work and dedication that it took to successfully migrate VAM World. Well done!
For all those who collect VAM's or who will be using
this new site, they owe @messydesk a huge thank you.
He took it upon himself to spend the time and effort
to make this happen. Many, many hours were spent
to make this work. Thank you!!!
Thank you @messydesk for all of the hard work you did and took the long hours to keep VamWorld going for us to use and enjoy! I for one enjoy going into there to learn about Vams and what I have on my Morgan Collection. I greatly appreciate the time you took to convert the site to where it is today, again, thank you very much, I greatly appreciate it very much!
Wow. Thanks for the effort!
You're half-way there. You just as well write the book......... and live forever in Numismatic Glory,
Indeed, congratulations on a job well done!