I've been working on a new site, Grokbase, to make it easy to read and access mailing list archives through modern web techniques. It's now ready for everyone to take a look, at http://grokbase.com. The site is based on Catalyst, Template::Toolkit, DBIx::Class::Storage and many other Perl modules. It also uses AJAX and JavaScript to make the browsing experience more efficient. Grokbase refers to each mailing list as a "group" and message threads as "topics."
The primary reasons to use a mailing list archive are to find information and to view it. In addition to enhancing both these, Grokbase allows you to keep track of useful information once you have found it. To help you find information, Grokbase has tag-based categorization and full-text search capabilities. Full-text search is powered by Xapian, and allows searching of both individual posts and entire threads with filtering on group and date. You can also search for groups themselves, a feature that will become useful as the number of archived lists grows. Viewing is enhanced through multiple viewing modes, DHTML and meta-data. Sometimes it is easier to access email by post, while at other times it is easier by topic. Grokbase allows viewing by post and by topic, having chronological/flat and thread modes for topic viewing. You can switch between view modes at any time and Grokbase will keep track of your preference. Thread viewing is enhanced with DHTML for thread collapsing and expansion. Post meta-data such as tags and vote scores are displayed in collapsed topic views to allow for quick scanning. To keep track of useful information once you have found it, Grokbase lets you tag and add notes to posts, groups and users. For example, http://www.grobkase.com/groups/tag/catalyst shows all groups tagged with "catalyst". Since there is not a lot of information associated with groups themselves, tags and notes are also indexed for searching groups. Tags propogate up to topics, so that a topic shares the tags of all of its messages. Each topic also has a "Grok counter", showing how many people have tagged posts in that thread, as a measure of topic popularity. Registration and use is free. Any mailing list can be archived by subscribing the Grokbase archive user to the list which will automatically create a group and begin archiving messages. For old messages, mbox files can be imported - contact me for details. The site is running in a public beta mode now. The beta label on the site will be removed once everything has been proven. A number of additional features may be added in the future, depending on user demand, please let me know what you'd like to see! Possibilities include ranking threads by pouplarity, web-based replies to the groups, XML feeds, access via Message-ID, and others. Feel free try it out at http://grokbase.com/ and let me know what you think. It would be great to get some feedback. -- John Wang http://www.dev411.com/blog/
_______________________________________________ List: [email protected] Listinfo: http://lists.rawmode.org/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
