[DAS] Plan to migrate the BioDAS.org website to GitHub Pages

[Peter Cock]

Hello all,

As many of you will know, the OBF server hosting BioDAS.org
and many other project websites needs to be rebuilt (the MediaWiki
instance in particular), or retired.

We have already migrated bioperl.org, biojava.org, biopython.org,
and biosql.org to GitHub Pages and I plan to attempt the same for
biodas.org next.

This has been discussed briefly in private, but I am aware we
may have overlooked some key people - please speak up!

The migration to GitHub Pages is contingent on the assumption
that http://biodas.org only hosted static content. I understand the
registry was at http://www.dasregistry.org which is (or was) a
more complicated website to administer.

Right now biodas.org is still online, but the MediaWiki instance
is broken, meaning the landing page does not work:

http://www.biodas.org/wiki/Main_Page

However, the static HTML pages and DTD files are still live, e.g.:

http://www.biodas.org/servers/LDAS.html

I've already created an (empty) GitHub organisation and invited
Andy Jenkinson, Lincoln Stein and Andreas Prlic as initial relevant
people. I've likely missed people so let me know:

https://github.com/biodas/

The potential new website repository is here:

https://github.com/biodas/biodas.github.io

The plan is to attempt to migrate the MediaWiki commits into
Markdown using https://github.com/peterjc/mediawiki_to_git_md
and also import the static content. You will be able to view the
work in progress here:

http://biodas.github.io/

If that all works out, we can then change the DNS settings to
point at the GitHub Pages hosting.

Regards,

Peter