Reply to: More admin and..... ARCHIVE !
Howdy, All.
Tim Engel wrote:
>> does any one have an archive of recent past
>> digests? I'd like to get up to speed. Thanks.
I wrote:
> I'm gonna volunteer to recycle a bunch of my personal gearbox
> email messages, through chapman-era, over the course of the next few
> weeks.
OK, I got a couple of thumbs up responses to this idea, so I'm going to start
actually doing this, within the next couple of days.
Meanwhile, there has been some continuing discussion of archive
methodology going on, kinda behind the scenes.
Michael Sands wrote:
>> I will collect what I see and place it on the web, assuming some time
>> comes available....
I responded:
> Not to worry! I think we have an easier solution now
Tim Engel wrote:
>> Sounds like the beginning of an archive to me.
Yes, indeed, Tim.... your comment has turned out to be literally correct!
Why? Well, an archive of our chapman-era postings *already exists* at
autox.team.net !
Mark Bradakis implemented this, at the very beginning! I wasn't aware of
this until just recently (doh) but ALL mailing lists hosted at autox.team.net
have message archives implemented as part of Mark's standard operating
procedure, and apparently all of these archives live permanently on Mark's
servers.
Once again, I must remark that I am impressed by the high standard of
efficiency, exhibited by Mark's smoothly oiled "mailing list machine", on
autox.team.net. I am really glad that we ended up here!
And Mark, thanx.
OK, I'm sure that y'all are wondering how to actually use this archive. Well,
it goes something like this:
Step 1: Send a message to Majordomo@autox.team.net with:
index chapman-era
in the body of the message.
You will soon receive email back from autox.team.net, with something like
this in the message body:
>>>> index chapman-era
total 62
-rw-rw---- 1 root mailadmin 31340 Feb 12 06:37 chapman-era.archive.9702
>>>>
Now, for those of you who are UNIX users, I *certainly* don't have to tell you
what this is! For the rest, suffice it to say that chapman-era.archive.9702 is
just a file name of one of the chapman-era archive files. (Later on, there
will
be many files in this list... when I sent my index request, there was only one.)
Step 2: Send a message to Majordomo@autox.team.net with:
get chapman-era chapman-era.archive.9702
in the body of the message.
In case it isn't obvious, the syntax of the above command is just:
get (list) (filename)
chapman-era appears twice, because it is both the name of the list, and the
first part of the name of the file.
You will soon receive email back from autox.team.net, with this:
>>>> get chapman-era chapman-era.archive.9702
List 'chapman-era' file 'chapman-era.archive.9702'
is being sent as a separate message.
>>>>
This is just a comment, confirming that your command did something.
Next, you will receive another email from autox.team.net, with the text of
that archive file. It may be quite long, and if your mail server has a message
length limitation (as mine does), it will probably convert the thing to an
attachment. That's OK, because it will be a simple text attachment, and it will
be easy enough to decode.
Voila!
Now, I'm sure the question that someone will immediately ask is, "OK, how
can I use a search engine, to content search this archive from the web?
Well, as far as I am aware, you can't. At least, not directly.
HOWEVER.... there is an alternative form of the message archives, which
gets updated much less frequently, but is in hypertext format. This is, of
course, html... and so I would *think* that it ought to be directly content
searchable using your favorite web based search engine. I'm not sure
yet whether or not this is actually true. Thoughts on this?
Here's a snippet from the page on www.team.net that describes this
hypertext archive service:
[ Welcome to the www.team.net Mailing List WWW Gateway (LWGate). This
[ service is intended to present information about a set of mailing lists,
allow
[ people to easily use mailing list commands, and provide a hypertext
[ interface to list archives which exist on the www.team.net server.
If you would like to know more about this, you can find this info at:
http://www.team.net/cgi-bin/lwgate
I don't believe there is an active hypertext archive link for chapman-era. But
the potential to implement one, certainly exists. I'll be asking Mark B. more
about this specifically, in the near future!
For now, I'm just happy to report that our posts *are* being captured for
future use, by us or by anyone who knows how to get access to these
archives.
erik.berg@trw.com
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