Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Alan MacHett" <machett AT ibiblio.org>]

I won't vote on which idea we should run with; I won't be doing the
programming (Did I detect a little sarcasm at the end of Michael's post? 
Hey! I did say I might not know what I'm talking about...)

In his article, Dave mentioned "a plea for mailing-list weblog
cross-polination from Tim O'Reilly".  If you visit that link and scroll
down the page a bit, you'll see several responses and suggestions; I'm not
sure which are worthwhile, but here's the reply of someone in our
situation:
>>
>> "Personally I'd like to see mailing list archiving tools adding
>> a "blog" option to the archive browsers.
>>
>> This would be managed by the list administrators/monitors. Each
>> 'noteable' message would get tagged (and tag-lined if need be)
>> for the blog front end to catch.

The whole blogging aspect raises one concern with me: organization (IA). 
Now, I'm ignorant of blogs, so I pose this question before I stick my foot
in my mouth (again).

How navigation-friendly and organization(IA)-friendly are blogs?

-Alan


Dave Johnson said:
> I wrote a short article about Michael's (and others I assume) ideas for
> the new INW website and in it I suggest a couple of possible
> weblog-based approaches to implementing an opt-in system for
> automatically publishing markup designated mailing-list messages as
> articles on a website.
>
> http://www.rollerweblogger.org/page/roller/20031023#mailing_list_weblog_integration
>
> I wrote the article to fish for ideas, so ideas, comments, and
> criticisms are welcome.


Michael D. Thomas said:
> I ran into the same wall. All we need is the ability to embed a unique
> identifier in the footer of each message, but mailman doesn't seem to
> provide support for that....
>
> I think the work-around is to embed a static link in the footer to a
> general editor's interface. I.e., the link says something like:
>
> "Like this email? Promote it to the website!"
>
> In a fair and just world, you'd click on the link and it would take you
> to a page that allows you to promote the email you were just reading.
> But mailman doesn't provide us with the building blocks for such
> functionality, it seems. The best that I think we can do is take the
> editor to a page that lists recent messages and allows them to fish them
> out.
>
> When an author needs to give permission, some authentication process is
> required. Else, we won't know if we really got permission. Anytime we
> talk about authentication or security, it's important to remember that
> we can be either very strict or very loose. We could be really strict
> and require biometric authentication (fingerprint, retinal scan, etc.)
> Or, we could be very loose and just do authentication through obscurity
> (send the author a dynamic URI, no one else should know it, assume that
> someone accessing the URI is the author.)
>
> The InterNetWorkers archives have always been public. The archives are
> really a separate entity from the 'New Web Site' effort.
>
> [snip]
>
> Yeah, parsing email is easy and fun. I love writing parsers. But since
> writing parsers is such a valuable experience, I'd be happy to see
> someone else distill the joy of writing the language parser.
>
> The promoting/editing/publishing process is a simple workflow system
> that uses an email and web interface. I would strongly suggest a SQL DB
> backend. Not quite as fun -- you have to deal with what Brooks calls
> "accidental complexity" to get email and web playing nicely in workflow
> -- but the experience is probably more valuable and relevant to other
> twenty-first century projects.