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Tim,
the archive is great - even too great. I will
have to restrict my urge for flippancy because everything will show up for
posteriority...
Also: I would recommend more care about the
"Reply" button
and restrict the prior blah-blah to only the
relevant previous post(s).
With such accurate archive-files it is not
necessary to repeat an
entire thread (relevant or not) all the time
when one adds only a quip.
Is there a proviso for search according to
names? that would be
even more scary (but very useful).
For starters: I leave here only your post to
which I reply.
Happy 2004 to you and all
John M
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 12:21
AM
Subject: Re: Web-searchable list
archives
Regarding the
web-based archives...I have some bad news and some good news.
:-/
First, the bad
news is that my down-and-dirty method of using the large monthly logfiles as a
way to get Google to add these discussions was a failure because Google
apparently sets a limit on the page size it will index. And nothing that Lsoft
provided would provide the necessary files.
The good news is
that this forced me to actually go down the road of using some real list
archiving software. Fortunately there is some decent GNU freeware out
there for this purpose. The result is that after tinkering most of today with
it, I've got web-based discussion list archives of this list's entire history
up and running with sorting by thread or date! I can incrementally
update this archive, so depending on volume I can update it monthly, weekly,
or whatever. And it ought to be a format that will make Google happy
too.
In the
conversion process from Outlook to Thunderbird (Mozilla) to
Mhonarc, it lost some of the extra html formatting on many of the
posts, but for the most part, the content came through unscathed. It even
brought over message attachments (I think there was only only one - but it was
something Judith posted written by her father.) This was better than I had
hoped. In the future, I'll have copies of posts go directly to
Thunderbird which should (in theory, anyway) allow html formatting to be fully
retained.
Let me know what
you think. In the future, I'll look into adding search capabilities to it, but
right now I have to give my brain a little rest. :)
Regards,
Tim
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