[Helpers] K-list archived digests & the FST links...

[Rich]

>     I tried for years to find someone, some way to put up the K-list
> archives as a few big database text files +  a program that would search
> the database and spit out an html page containing many emails with that
> keyword, or an author and date range. Even my druid took a whack at it.

Okay, in summary, I think google has it handled as far as searching goes,
why not add a google search box directly into the site (this can be found on
many other sites).

>    In the end I had to give up, it seemed the only way to get the archives
> back online was to convert it to tens of thousands of individual html
> files.

Why not do it this way... Have database files for each year's messages and
generate the page automatically from the database. I can do this for you. 

This way you only need to manage a few pages instead of 1000's. The linking
and searching would still be there but the current catalogue under google
would be lost, unless you leave all the old pages in the site.

>    Fortunately, I found a program which does that automatically, but I
> still have to tweak it a lot after, spam proof all the email addresses,
> and
> convert the humungous years index into monthly index files by hand.
> Hillary
> helped with that part, last time.

I'd have the index automatically created out of the subject lines of each
message.

>     I also usually spend some time doing a search and delete of hotmail
> spam sigs, unsnipped digests, and other useless junk. Much easier since we
> got off yahoo.
>    I could skip that part, but I'd rather take the time to do it, than
> have
> my site spamming for hotmail, google, msn, etc..

I guess a lot could be taken out by search and replace but in my experience
it's not as simple as this, due to line breaks and changing text in the
message footers etc. The effective way would be to go through each message
but it's darn time consuming as sometimes people quote another's message and
include the footer as well so have to check for quoted signature lines too!

>    on a related note... Richard has finally solved part of an ongoing
> problem with the years of digests, and converted them all back to
> individual emails. Yay Richard!!

It was a labour of love. My search for understanding drove me to do it
propelled by Goddess, to create an easily searchable (pinpointing words in
messages) and thread viewable format of every message that I could use in my
MS Outlook as well as other Unix style readers (Firefox/Eudora/NetScape). 

I got the golden carrot nearly as I had finished the task - learning
something so relevant to the concern I had that I burst out laughing in the
night when I couldn't sleep. I think the original author wrote it about 5-6
years back.

r