Blog News: “Unified Download Center” not so unified anymore

Sooner or later it had to happen. Today we share news which is both good and bad. Firstly, let’s discuss the good part.

Thanks to our precious contributors’ support, the blog has received a lot of audio/video/image material ever since it began its online journey. This material is being gradually posted and shared as time goes by. This is amazing and it is mind-blowing when analyzing the situation in terms of the amount of stuff that the Temple has been able to put out, when we think about how small and unambitious the whole project began merely two years ago. The endeavor clearly shows there is still a considerable breadth of fans which demand for older Goo Goo Dolls releases, and we’re proud to be the receptacle for such wishes.

Secondly, the bad part. More digital releases also means more hard disk space. Initially, I thought 50GB’s would be more than enough for all of the releases I thought the Temple would have shared throughout its entire existence. Happily, that is not the case. The “Unified Download Center” relies on Mega‘s services, and those 50GB’s have now run out. As a consequence, I was basically forced to open another Mega account, hence splitting the archive into at least two sections.

Why did I write “at least”? Well, the first Mega account was an old one created when they offered 50GB’s of space. Nowadays, those types of accounts don’t exist anymore, and new ones only come with 20GB’s of storage. Therefore, as soon as those 20GB’s end up like the first old account (filled up to its teeth), I will likely be forced once again to open another one and split the archive once more, and then keep repeating the process, and so on and so forth until needed…

I understand all of this goes against the whole concept of unifying the archive in order to offer our readers with a sole, comprehensive place where to locate all of the stuff we put out (which basically is anything under the Download category), something that was at the very conceptual core of the “Unified Download Center”. Due to force majeure, that is not feasible anymore and a splitting of the archive has to happen.

In a way, at this point I would say the APP initiative ended up being the real unified place. Obliviously both services will keep running for the time being. The main difference between the two is that Mega offers better speeds and more reliability when downloads take place, while the Archive.org is usually clogged and laggy. Nevertheless, they both are marvelous resources even though they were established for different reasons, which I briefly detail below:

  • The “Unified Download Center” aimed at offering an easy way for readers to locate downloadable stuff the Temple has released, a bird’s-eye-view of everything the blog had to offer in terms of digital releases.
  • The “Archive.org Preservation Project” (APP) aimed at preserving all of the aforementioned digital released when the website would not have been functional anymore, so older readers and newcomers wouldn’t be left with empty hands.

Both services travel in parallel, steering in the same direction, but there are substantial differences. For now, I encourage our readers to utilize them both, even now that one of them has slightly changed its nature, morphing into something a bit different but still very much useful.

Temple Of Goo staff

Live At The Hartford Civic Center, Hartford, CT (1999) [Video]

A few months ago we posted the audio version for a 1999 concert the Goo Goo Dolls performed during the “Dizzy Up The Girl” tour. Today, we share its visual counterpart.

Continue reading “Live At The Hartford Civic Center, Hartford, CT (1999) [Video]”