Bubkes, Stephen Lewis explains, is “Yiddish for beans; early-20th-century Bronx-, Brooklyn-, and Lower-East-Side-ese for very inconsequential matters.” It’s also the name of his blog at Bubkes.org — which, perhaps miraculously, is back up again.
Though not for long.
Bubkes is hosted by Userland, a company that has been bobbing belly-up for the past few months. As Dave wrote in The (safe) future of Radio and Manila, “At some point the userland.com servers will shut down. I don’t know what will be done with the domain. What I care about are the items above. If anyone has an opinion about the other stuff, I don’t know who you would call. I expect to refer to this paragraph many times in the coming weeks and months.” Among the many “items above” is Skywave, an old blog of mine that I’m glad to see kept alive in archived form (and for which I thank Dave and friends for rescuing with other former radio.userland blogs).
Bubkes.org, however, is among the “other stuff” Dave mentioned. So I’m calling on anybody who wants to help convert it from Manila to WordPress, so it can persist as a WordPress blog at the same URL. There are scripts for doing this, but we’re having trouble getting the archive in a convertible form. If any of ya’ll have some ideas, let me know.
Worst case, we move the text and graphics by hand. Those have already been saved off as HTML. But I’d like to give a less labor-intensive alternative a shot before we do that.
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