Greetings folks, I've been a bit swamped the last few days and have just caught up with all of you again.
Mike Monett: Yes I got your message(s). Comments to follow: Dan writes: >> I'm not sure what Mike Devour has against archives... Nothing against the idea, Dan. Mike has it about right: > It is dangerous to assume what is going on in someone else's mind, > but I don't think Mike D. has anything against the archives. I know he > was working on software to replace the eskimo archives, but this turns > out to be quite difficult. I could write a simple program to strip the > headers and the email addresses from a post, but I could not write the > code to index the posts by date or by thread. That is beyond my > capability. So perhaps Mike D. found the same problem and simply had > to give up. There are many options. Each requires climbing a helluva learning curve, which I am finding to be a much greater challenge than when I was younger and healthier. I have not given up, but the progress I'm making is slow and not tangible to any of you, yet. Mike M. has mentioned mail-archive.com... > In the meantime, probably nobody knew that a service like the mail > archives was available. I'm pretty sure I looked at mail-archive.com at least briefly a year or two back, Mike. I've spent today giving it a very close look. I've subscribed to their user mailing list and asked a few questions. It's given me a chance to work with their system (solid) and evaluate the quality of support (responsive). There are only a couple of concerns I have that might be serious enough to stop me from setting us up with them, at least as an interim solution. I'll get the rest of my questions answered and stew on it for a couple more days. I may need advice from the group. I've also considered using Mhonarc, which is the archiving package used by mail-archive, along with one of several search packages that are out there to set up our own archives, which could then be customized fully to our requirements... but it gets real hairy real fast, technically. Another option is to use any of the popular forum software packages as a pretty web archive front-end. Things get hairy again on two fronts: getting the posts into the database, all threaded and cleaned up; and enabling full bi-directional messaging for both forum and e-mail subscribers. The first task is probably the easier of the two. The intermediate step of enabling new list messages to post to the forum, acting strictly as an archive, is really just a special case of this. The second task, full forum/email integration, is needed if we want to enable the forum interface without losing a lot of our members who need or prefer to use e-mail. I've been keeping tabs on a couple of different projects trying to get this implemented, but it's a niche application without enough demand to draw the programming talent needed, so progress is uneven. There is also an entirely different approach, using a content management framework such as Drupal. Again there's a learning curve, but there's also a lot of support available and quite a bit of energy in that project. Many of the modules needed to do what we need already seem to exist, if I can put them together. I'm continuing to peck away at tutorials. I want archives, at minimum. I'd be a lot happier if I could replace this entire archaic mailing list setup with something that would get us securely on the web, enable web participation while preserving e-mail services for the group, *and* allow me to recruit others to help with the day-to-day chores of running the place. A complete revamp would bring us fully into the 21st century, serve the needs of more people and do it better, and guard us against a number of potential failure modes, at least one of which is me. If I can get us into a workable archive in the meantime, I will. I'm open to discussion, though it might be better for the main group if all of us who are interested migrate to the Off Topic List? It's already been very quiet over there lately, and I'd be willing to restrict the topic to this for a while if that will encourage participation. Let me know. Be well, Mike D. [Mike Devour, Citizen, Patriot, Libertarian] [mdev...@eskimo.com ] [Speaking only for myself... ] -- The Silver List is a moderated forum for discussing Colloidal Silver. Instructions for unsubscribing are posted at: http://silverlist.org To post, address your message to: silver-list@eskimo.com Address Off-Topic messages to: silver-off-topic-l...@eskimo.com The Silver List and Off Topic List archives are currently down... List maintainer: Mike Devour <mdev...@eskimo.com>
