Where to start with the last few days? Why not here! The RetroChallenge 2022/10 results are in. Looks like I nabbed the Grand Prize. Not too bad.

SuperNick (Nick) also got a place, congratulations! He won the Australian Computer Museum Society (ACMS) grand prize last year.

That poor pumpkin Mac just can’t catch a break.

I honestly believe it deserved a place. I suppose as the grand prize winner, I can relinquish my title and hand it to the true winner - Tim. Why? Pumpkin Mac has more merch of course!

On the topic of RetroChallenge 2022/10, where we tried to bend the GeoCities archive to our needs, I’ve coincidentally been trying to cook up the following: Solr + Nutch + Blacklight in a Docker setup.

So far, from what I understand: Solr is the search platform and index, Nutch is the web crawler feeding content into it, and Project Blacklight is the search frontend talking to Solr. This should allow full-text searching of the GeoCities Archive. And Docker? Well I’ve wanted to make GeoCities even more portable for a long while and now I’ve started making inroads.

Above is a crippled Blacklight. Not quite functional yet. Search doesn’t work and I lost the formatting… wait, was PHP even installed? Maybe that’s it! Nope. Blacklight is a Ruby on Rails application, so PHP was a complete red herring. This is why it is good to think out loud. 😆

Regardless, dockerising it has been tricky, but fun. I am definitely making progress though. Do I have a Dockerfile? Why yes, I do have a Dockerfile. I’ve dreamed of making one since 2019, and can now confirm it is magical. Quite hacky, of course, but that’s generally the way I roll. 😎

Sources