At 11:09 04-05-2002 -0500, John Horn wrote: > > Could you just start on it now, or soon, and mention on the page that > > the feature is for the time period May X, 2002 and later? That would > > keep you from having to spend all the time on it, but it would start > > being useful for various purposes within a month. > > > > If, after a few weeks, some earlier poster doesn't appear on the list at > > all, one can safely assume they haven't posted in the past few weeks, > > anyway. :) > > >That sounds good to me. Building this going forward would be almost just as >good. How does the program work now? As new emails come in a counter is >updated for each email address?
Program? What program? :-) Every day, once all the messages from the previous day have arrived, those messages are sorted by sender. I count the number of posts from each individual member and enter that number into a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet (one for each year, so that is seven files) is made up of 13 pages: one for each month plus one for the totals. Each "month" page contains a column with the names of all posters plus a column for every day of the month. In another spreadsheet the grand totals are collected (not manually of course, but through links to the "Totals" page of the various other spreadsheets). Those numbers are gathered on the first page of the spreadsheet and automatically copied to the second page. The list on that page is then sorted by number of posts and exported to a HTML file. That file is then edited to some unwanted code added by Excel, after which the table is copied to the HTML file that will go on-line. That file then gets slightly edited to reflect the correct date and is then uploaded. Really, that sounds a lot more elaborate than it actually is. Nevertheless, it needs to be changed (read: made easier). The problem is that every time a new poster arrives, I have to update all those spreadsheets (add the new poster). That is still doable now (eight spreadsheets) but I hate to think of the time it will take to manually update them all by the time Brin-L celebrates its 20th birthday... I am considering converting the whole thing to MS Access (which would also allow me to quickly provide other statistics as well), but I am not sure how suitable it is for a database that right now would contain some 80,000 records (and reach 100,000 in the next few years). Jeroen _________________________________________________________________________ Wonderful World of Brin-L Website: http://www.Brin-L.com Tom's Photo Gallery: http://tom.vanbaardwijk.com
