Re: [ba-ohs-talk] bootstrap list message content & purple numbers
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eugene Eric Kim" <eekim@eekim.com>
To: <ba-ohs-talk@bootstrap.org>
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2001 10:18 PM
Subject: Re: [ba-ohs-talk] bootstrap list message content & purple numbers (01)
> On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, Peter Jones wrote:
>
> > I've just hacked a desperate perl script (yep, I need the practice) that
> > accesses the HTML archives for
> > ba-unrev-talk, in the hopes of being able to add some interesting
metadata
> > to the backlink db... eventually.
>
> Now _this_ is the kind of message I like to see! :-) (02)
By metadata I meant more in the line of keywords or phrases to label the
associations between message bodies and the links they contain - heading in
the topic mapping direction, or something like that. Hence my scraping the
HTML - less other stuff to remove and element tags can be handy indicators
for things. I've only just started thinking about it though. At this time
I'm not sure whether it would add anything beyond what a crude search
facility would (the usual issue) - but I'll keep chewing for a while. (03)
>
> Let me save you some trouble Peter (and anybody else who wants to hack on
> this). The code I wrote to do the purple numbers and backlink extraction
> is a filter for MHonArc (http://www.mhonarc.org/). I've been meaning to
> release the code; I've just been lazy.
>
> If you want to do this kind of hacking, it's better to start with the
> MHonArc filter. It'll give you nice, programmatic access to the e-mail
> metadata; no need to deserialize ugly, serialized HTML data. I'll be
> happy to step you through the code. MHonArc is nice and powerful, but its
> internals leave something to be desired. (04)
Have you got a version with lots of documentation? (I hate reading
unannotated perl ;-) (05)
>
> > And then I noticed something incidentally potentially irksome about
purple
> > numbering in this message
> >
> > http://www.bootstrap.org/lists/ba-unrev-talk/0111/msg00014.html
> >
> > Lots of sentences and paragraphs, but only 1 purple number because the
'>'s
> > cloud the issue.
>
> That is correct. A consequence of my least-effort algorithm. :-(
>
> > Would it be better to replace >s with indents in the HTML prior to
adding
> > purple numbering?
>
> Not sure I understand the suggestion. Are you suggesting not purple
> numbering these quotes at all? (06)
No, I'm suggesting that if you replace the > characters with something that
is inert with respect to the purple numbering processing (maybe some nifty
CSS styling indicator wrapped around each quoted line - maybe with a colour
change for the background (?)) then separate paragraphs will be numbered
nice and neatly and it will display well too. (07)
>
> -Eugene
>
> --
> +=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/
===+
> | "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they
|
> +===== can have an excuse to drink alcohol." --Steve Martin
===========+
>
> (08)