I’m a Tourist – Get me out of Here!

Wellington Community Net (WCN) is a free web hosting service for Wellington community groups. WCN has been funded by the City Council for a number of years now, but that funding is now under review.

WCN hosts 600 odd community groups, meaning that alot of the content that Search Wellington indexes is probably hosted on WCN. I wanted to find out how much.

All WCN sites are physically hosted on the same machine. Taking a dump of all valid websites from Search Wellington, and filtering out the who’s DNS resolves to the WCN server, should identify WCN hosted sites.

The Search Wellington API can then be used to tag each of these sites with a hidden ‘wcnhosted’ tag. The following Perl script checks the DNS for the uses an API call to apply a tag to wcn hosted sites.

All of the news items and feeds published by these sites are automatically pulled into this tag, giving:

http://wellington.gen.nz/wcnhosted

Which shows that approximately 340 of 9000 odd indexed, news items originated from WCN.

This is a low measurement, as Search Wellington chooses not to list all groups on WCN and only includes news items with a permanent url, but I think shows that the loss of WCN would leave quite a significant hole in the local webspace.