permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflondon@mindspring.com>]

The good folks at ibiblio (our list provider) have thoughtfully
installed new mailing list software for us to run our Permaculture
list on. This will be a great improvement over the current Lyris
program. In keeping with ibiblio's mission to be The Public's Library 
and make information in all formats and open source software freely
available to the public-at-large this new list software uses an open
source software program, part of the the GNU project, Mailman, written
in the Python programming language. The move to Mailman, when it
occurs, hopefully within the next month or two, wil be transparent to
all list subscribers and there will be no interruption in the
functioning of our forum. The only change will be in list usage
details. I will rewrite the list FAQ to reflect all changes.

The new list will be easier to use and far more functional and robust.
One of the best new features is that all out message archives will be 
presented in standard web (html & text) format, offering very fast
access,  instead of being in a database. This means that all our
messages will exist directly on the web and can be regularly indexed
by all the Web search engines thus making all the good information
presented here far more available to an international audience through
the powerful search tools they offer. This will enable us to get
permaculture out to the world in a much more complete way.

I'll let you know more about features and usage as soon as I learn
more about the software. I know at this time that it will have an
email and web interface and hopefully a news interface too.
The web interface, in addition to users being able to sub/unsub/change
user config, offers message archives organized by month and
downloadable as such in one text file (it is in standard UNIX mailbox
format so can be processed with mhonarc or hypermail to create a
mail2html archive on anyone else's website [ex: someone wants to
present a particularly valuable discussion thread on permaculture
zones in their own PC  website - all should be encouraged to do this
as desired), or readable/downloadable by day. The archive
can be sorted by date, author, subject and thread. 

Here is the startup website for ibiblio's mailman mailing lists. Go
here to see what this new software is like. I think most of you will
be pleased with what you see and look forward to the changeover.

The mailman page with example message archives:
http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman.html

The mail mailman page at ibiblio:
http://public.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo

I want to start a new list for market farming, called marketfarming. 
Would anyone in this list be interested in a forum on this topic?
Would there be more interest in one for permaculture gardening,
homestead gardening or market gardening?
There's a real need for a forum on market farming with emphasis on
permaculture and natural, biointensive and biodynamic methods. The
other lists on this subject that I am aware of don't seem to offer
much in the hands-on realm so my plans are at this  time to start the
marketfarming forum as soon as the new list software becomes available
to us. Feedback welcome.

LL
permaculture list owner