Tony Krzyzewski wrote
>Would it be possible for the person who posted the messages DBASEIII file
>to the ftp server to update it.
Tony - Pete Thomas did the work on this initially. I'm not sure how often
he plans to update the dBase version, but I have a different solution,
available free for anyone who wants it and can use it.
I considered what might happen as the archive grew, that if Peter simply
added the new messages to the main file, it would get progressively bigger,
and anyone downloading it would be spending a lot of online time getting
repeat copies of the earlier messages. So, despite not wishing to seem
ungrateful for Peter's work in massaging the raw message info, I decided to
set up my own massage service (for personal use only, until now).
Although I keep a copy of the current month's messages in a dedicated
Eudora Mailbox, I don't try to process those messages. Just after the
beginning of each month, I set a "get" request to the robot in control for
the previous month's archive. The file I get back is saved on disc, and
then I run my little massage program on it. (Although I use it in the form
of a Mac application, it's written in C, so it should translate into pretty
much any environment or platform without much hassle.) [Incidentally, my
program also (sorry Avnet!) removes the sponsor's line from the tail of
each message, thus saving quite a bit of space over 1500+ messages. I have
put an acknowledgement in all the screens of my database file, though.] The
result is a tab-delimited text file with 6 fields:
list server timestamp (formatted);
list server datestamp (formatted);
author time
author name
subject string;
message string.
Each record (6 fields) is separated by a newline character. This
tab-delimited format will plug into just about anything anyone uses for
data management (even Excel :-)). I use FileMaker on the Mac, but you can
use your own favourite tool.
So, now, I can download each month's messages and add them to my existing
FileMaker database (now at about 2.1M including July's stuff).
Now that I've offended both the sponsor & poor Peter who spends quite a bit
of time keeping this list on the rails, the question is - does anyone want
the Mac application or the C source so they can do their own massaging? If
so, what's best? Should I put it up on the ftp site (no, no need, since
it's a text file), or ask Monu to put it among the text files retrievable
by e-mail? Or should I just send it direct by e-mail to anyone who asks for
it? I guess it depends on how many ask - maybe what I'll do is put it up
for e-mail download if more than 2 people ask for it. The source is only
about 12k, and that includes over 70 lines of my deathless prose as
comments! NO, I shan't post it to the list!
Well, enough about computer stuff, back to Europas.
cheers
Rowland
... that's Rowland with a 'w' ...
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