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Re: Phys-L messages ---> web



Those who were not reading July messages missed the thread about the
mental process of understanding physics. The messages of that thread
can now be accessed from my NEW home page. Feel free to link to it.

http://alpha.montclair.edu/~kowalskiL

I now have two home pages, one on the Unix platform and one on the VAX/VMS
platform. I am strongly alergic to Unix and used it only when there were no
other choices (wearing a mask). The VMS page is likely to be more pleasant.
I plan to use it for selected phys-L threads. You can help by creating html
documents (from phys-L messages of those threads that you collect) and by
e-mailing them to me. Fortunately, the html tags are ASCII characters.
Contact me, perhaps we can do something useful together.
Ludwik Kowalski

Ludwik,

I hear rumors that the latest and greatest version of the listserv SW (1.8c)
has nice hooks built into it that allow web access and web searches of
archived postings. If anyone else can confirm this actually works (here at
NAU I'm n+1th priority with the listserv support people) maybe we can press
Dick Smith (who generously and selflessly runs PHYS-L) to check it out.
However, I'd hate to send him on a wild goose chase now if this new
version does not live up to its billing (we want to save this particular
favour for when it really counts).

Has anyone on the list used the latest, greatest listserv version 1.8c?
Do the web hooks work well?

I have appended entirely too many listserv 1.8c claims from docs at
www.Lsoft.com:

Dan M


Dan MacIsaac, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Northern AZ Univ
danmac@nau.edu http://www.phy.nau.edu/~danmac/homepage.html



*************************************************
* (non-VM) Usability: New web archive interface *
*************************************************

Version 1.8c introduces a WWW archive interface that allows users to
browse and search list archives (the LISTSERV maintainer controls which
lists are or are not visible through this interface). Postings can be
organized by date, by topic or by author, and a search function with
online help is provided. URLs in the text of the postings are displayed
as 'live' hyperlinks. LISTSERV's WWW interface has the following
advantages over "hypermail" style web archiving:

- The information on the web is always up to date. New postings are shown
as soon as they are received.

- The postings can be organized in the manner that best suits the reader:
by date, by author, by topic, with or without table of contents, with
or without showing the author, etc.

- Only one copy of the information is kept, and in particular there is no
need to create an individual HTML file for each posting. This design
allows the interface to scale up gracefully to lists with hundreds of
thousands of archived postings, which would otherwise require hundreds
of thousands of individual HTML files, wasting disk space (each file
takes up at least one disk block) and stressing the file system past
reasonable limits.

- The search forms can be used to create search requests matching all
postings in the last X days. The resulting URL can then be bookmarked
and reloaded on a regular basis.

- List owners can customize the main page for their lists without any
intervention by the LISTSERV maintainer, by updating one of the mail
templates for their list. The LISTSERV maintainer can customize common
pages and header/trailer HTML statements by updating system mail
templates.

To take advantage of this new interface, you must first ensure that the
"Notebook=" options for your list are compatible with the WWW interface.
In most cases, you will not have to do anything, but certain options are
incompatible with the use of the WWW interface and may need to be
changed:

- The archive frequency must be WEEKLY, MONTHLY or YEARLY. SEPARATE and
SINGLE notebooks are not supported. L-Soft generally recommends
converting lists with SINGLE notebooks to YEARLY unless there is a
compelling reason to have all the messages in exactly one file.

- For optimal performance, the archive frequency may need to be adjusted
to produce an "adequate" number of topics and messages in each archival
period. The definition of "adequate" depends on your users, the kind of
equipment they have, and how they connect to the Internet. As a rule,
home users will prefer a larger number of smaller archives whereas
office users with large screens and T1 or better connectivity will
tolerate a larger table of contents.

- The archives must be public as there is no userid/password control in
the web archive interface.

- On most systems, the directory in which your list archives are kept
must be specified in absolute rather than symbolic form, or the WWW
interface may not be able to access it. Symbolic form is when the
directory name is a single letter, for instance "Notebook= Yes,L,
Monthly,Public" ("L" is the directory specification). In most cases,
your list header will read "Notebook=Yes,E:\LISTS\XYZ-L,Monthly,Public"
and you will not have to worry about this.

You must then ask the LISTSERV maintainer to enable your list for the WWW
interface. This may require the installation of a web server and of the
WWW interface code itself. You can then modify the WWW_INDEX mail
template to customize the main archive page for your list. See the list
owner's guide for more information on customizing mail templates.