I've been playing about with a new feature in the archive browser and I
think it might be ready to announce. I'm a little nervous about the load it
puts on the server, but hopefully it will stay alive.

If you go to piclist.com and click on "archive" then "today" (or any day)
then "Thread" to sort the posts people sent that day by thread, clicking on
the subject of a thread will show (on the left side by default) the entire
conversation included in that tread. 

Or if you like, just click on this for a demo:
http://www.piclist.com/techref/postbot.asp?by=time&id=piclist\2006\11\20&ord
er=thread then select a thread to view.

It tries to do a number of things that are darn hard.

- It tries to remove quoted text when it is extraneous, but NOT when it is
really being used. I'm sure it isn't really getting that right, and I would
love it if anyone could point out examples where it gets it wrong either by
not removing quoted text that should be remove or by removing quoted text
that should not be removed.

- It displays information about the poster (gleaned only from their email
address) on the right side of each post. If there is no picon for a domain,
some tricky JavaScript attempts to load a favicon from the domains web site,
but then falls back to just the text of the domain name if one is not found.
And it still wraps correctly in the columnar format for the little .com,
.net and .org's icons or into rows for country names and flags.

- It attempts to figure out what FAQ page applies to the subject at hand and
lists that at the top of the page. Minor A.I. application there. Real fun to
try to get working.

- If I have a picture of the posters face on file (or in a picon) then it
puts that up there as well. If your face isn't there, please consider
sending me a head shot. If your face need to be updated, send me a current
one. Or stay young forever. If your face IS there and you don't want it...
Convince me why I should take it off and I will. Most importantly, if you
have a picture of any of the regular posters, sneak it to me so I can put
them in. Top of my list are the faces of: Gerhard Fiedler, David VanHorn,
Herbert Graf, Dan Smith

Those last two aren't really all that new as you would see that for
individual posts as well. 

So, here are the questions other than the standard "what is good/bad about
it":

- In the standard, chronological "post" order, clicking on the thread
subject pulls up a short list of the posts by date and time with the authors
name. Then you click on the posts you want. It is slightly faster. Should I
retain that or just switch to this thread view for either ordering of the
daily posts? Should it be a user settable option? 

- I'm not a graphical arts type person. I constantly get feedback that my
web sites don't "look nice" because I don't use style sheets, fancy fonts,
background images, etc... Part of that is because I LOVE getting HTML to
wrap to any screen size and watching the elements compensate for changes in
the size of the browser window. Part of that is because I'm not artistically
inclined in that way. What specific changes would you make to approve the
appearance of the archive?

Thanks!

---
James Newton: PICList webmaster/Admin
mailto:jamesnewton@piclist.com  1-619-652-0593 phone
http://www.piclist.com/member/JMN-EFP-786
PIC/PICList FAQ: http://www.piclist.com


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