We Are Back in Business!

But hold your horses! We’ve only just begun the recovery process from the most-destructive event Holocaust revisionism has ever suffered. Here are the things we still have to work on for quite some time to come:

• So far, we have recovered only the English-language material. This encompasses a little more than 50% of the original contents in the CODOH library. The German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish and Turkish contents are yet to follow. In particular the Italian section will be a major challenge, as this consists mainly of content dumped into the CODOH database when the Italian website olodogma.com went offline after Italy banned Holocaust skepticism in 2016. This dumping process was literal. To this day, this material, a huge coding mess, looks like someone puked into our web database. We won’t release it again in that shape, but we currently do not have the resources to go through some one thousand Italian posts and clean them up. That’ll have to wait until later, funding provided.
• Three features of each entry are still missing: the meta-data entry “other contributors”, which is a minor point, but was encoded wrongly when we did the data extraction from our backup. We work on correcting this right now. This will be added shortly. (Not that anyone will notice.) Furthermore, the meta-data entry “Sources” (bibliographic infos on each entry, if available) was completely overlooked when doing the data extraction, so we’ll have to patch that up, too, hopefully within a day or two. More importantly, non of our library entries currently are associated with any of our categories. Hence, search by topics within the category tree won’t yield anything. Since many contributors in the past did not associate the proper categories to their post, if any at all, this, too requires some major manual cleaning up. A temporary solution featuring the old (often flawed/wrong) categories will be up maybe within a week, but the clean-up work will last months.
• Furthermore, all links to resources are dysfunctional. Hence, illustrations won’t show, download links won’t work, and cross-references to other CODOH pages point nowhere. That will be a massive challenge to fix, but it will get done. One step at a time. We won’t make any promises as to how long it will take, though. The images, posts, and download files are all there, just not at the place where the old site had them saved.
• Next, our new framework comes with different styling features that do not always square with what we had in the old CODOH database. Hence, at times things may not look pretty. This is mainly a matter of getting the proper illustrations and linked media reinstated, but also an issue of adjusting the CSS stylesheets and/or the actual html code. This will be a long work in progress.
• In addition, functionality is always an issue. Things are quite as functional and informative as we would like to have them, but to fix this requires some tweaking with plug-ins and custom coding. We’ll get there. If you miss some functionality or spot something that you think doesn’t work as it should, please do not hesitate to let us know.
• Ultimately, the plan is moreover to merge all the contents of the old website vho.org into the CODOH database, since that domain name was lost due to the hostile sabotage event we suffered around the past turn of the year. We could just move the site (completely intact and operational on my hard drive) to another domain. However, that site has been static for a long time, hence a mere inactive archive. It is time to move its resources to where it makes sense: into our large library. Here, the same is true as was mentioned about the Italian stuff. The vho.org code is very old and messy, hence requires some major cleaning up to before it can be transferred. We are talking about more than 10,000 documents, roughly the size of what CODOH currently would be if all its languages were included.
• And last but not least, we have yet to build our standard pages, such as About Us, Contact Us, Volunteers, Donate, Terms & Conditions, etc. pp. all to show up in a menu that doesn’t yet exist for exactly that reason. That’s what’s at the top of the agenda.

A big shout-out goes to LeRoy for providing us with a most-recent backup, and to Black Falcon, who has been invaluable in extracting and organizing that backup data. Without him, we would have been unable to extract and reformat this data as quickly as we did. And, yes, two months IS quick when talking of a mass of data that brought every single piece of software in my possession to the brink of its abilities — and beyond!

Any potential volunteers who have some knowledge on how to handle html code (html 3) to be brought into the hmtl5 world, so we can tackle the Italian and vho.org coding nightmares, please get in touch with us, so we can keep you busy!

If you want to read about the hostile sabotage event we suffered, please go here. I won’t waste my time on this any further.