It goes without saying that the archive we’ve provided here for some time now doesn’t really do much in the way of context or any other information for that matter, which has always bothered me. It’s more of a file dump than an archive. And what’s also bothered me is that, besides the Internet Archive, there are few sites that aim to provide a curated catalogue of data.

This is something I deeply wanted to change and something we’ve started working on.

So, today, after some delay, I’m happy to finally unveil the future of our archive in the form of The Data Dungeon! It’s faster, we can update it more frequently, and we have our own in-house indexing tool for generating the whole thing.

This is of course a first step for the new archive, and right now it’s very raw, but this will change over the coming weeks (and months) as we provide our indexing tool with more metadata and make further improvements.

If you’ve got any feedback for us too, we now have a GitHub repository open for tickets and, of course, our Discord.

Roadmap

As mentioned, this initial release is very raw but we have a number of features we’re already working on which you will see introduced over the coming weeks.

  • Merge builds/source into a ‘Distributions’ set, grouped into collections by what they are - automatically organized by age w/ thumbnails
  • HTML pages per file with additional information for that given file inc. preview, content listings, and more
  • Search functionality
  • A copy of the site HTML zipped for download so output can be archived
  • An automatically generated list of changes
  • Make the indexer open-source so others can contribute it and use it for their own collections

Q&A

Q. What does this mean for TalonBrave.info?

This blog will continue to exist and ‘TalonBrave.info’ will continue being the face of The Data Dungeon.

Q. What will happen to the TalonBrave.info File Archive?

For now, it will remain, but as the new archive matures, we will eventually be looking to shut it down. That said, we will be looking at setting up redirects for everything under the Dynamic directory.