Is there any more news about the fate of the outliners.com archive? Last I heard back on May 4th was that Chris was having problems reading the contents of the file he had received.

Derek

I've played around with the file I have a few times to see if I could get something more readable by humans extracted from it. So far, none of my attempts have been very successful. Although it's kind of a pain, opening up the orginal file I posted in Notepad or other text editor will at least let you search through the content of messages.

http://www.outlinersoftware.com/files/outliner-opml.zip

Chris

Chris -

Thanks for giving me the url again for the file. I must have missed it first time around.

I see what you mean about the format. It's meant to be an opml one, but I haven't been able to load it into Bonsai Desktop or Tkoutline - outliners allegedly able to read opml files - either by using the *root or *.opml extensions. RadioUserland was able to load it as *.root into some sort of outline/table-like display but I couldn't get it to show individual messages, let alone threads, properly. Maybe the format is meant for RSS readers. It beats me...

As you say, it is possible to extract text from the file and search it. I have used TotalCommander's lister viewer to do this, but a better way seems to be to index and search using dtSearch (other similar programs will probably do just as well). The results from this display reasonably, although not threaded in any way.

Derek

As an addendum, using the free indexed search engine, Wilbur (http://wilbur.redtree.com/download.htm gives a considerably better and quicker result than dtSearch.

Derek

It's certainly not an OPML file, as it's not XML.

Derek Cornish wrote:

Is there any more news about the fate of the outliners.com archive? Last I heard back on
May 4th was that Chris was having problems reading the contents of the file he had
received.

Derek

Hi Derek,

I modified a script I found on the web to output the messages in the .root file a text file. The fields are tab-delimited with a CRLF at the end of every message. Unfortunately I know very little about the object database or the scripting language (just what I learned this morning), so I won't be much help if you want it in a different format. FWIW, I hope the text file is a little easier to work with.

You can download it from:

http://www.ideacruncher.com/tableoutput.zip

Regards!
Tom Nantais

Thanks Tom, that is awesome! This file is something I can easily rework back into the site so we have a searchable web archive of the messages.

Chris

Thanks to Tom's efforts, the outliners.com archive is now online at http://www.outlinersoftware.com/archives/ - you can also search through the messages using the site search page.

I haven't done anything to clean out spam messages, and I remember there being a few. I will get rid of these when I have a chance.

Although the orginal file had email addresses, I have removed them and am just showing the username portion (before the @ sign). The original outliners.com message id is also shown in case you are trying to locate a particular message (you can enter the original message id as a search term).

Thanks again, Tom! And also thanks to Dave Winer who kept outliners.com running for so long and was kind enough to supply us with the file of messages.

Chris

Brilliant!

Thanks Tom & Chris. There are a lot of jewels in those archives.

Chris, is it possible to increase the grouping of messages at the bottom from batches of five? Being able to browse in batches of 10, 20 or more would be useful.

Thanks again

Jack

Jack Crawford wrote:

is it possible to increase the grouping of messages at the bottom from batches of five?
Being able to browse in batches of 10, 20 or more would be useful.

Sure, the archives now show 25 messages per page.

Chris

Thanks very much for doing this, Tom. From the Archives display here I can see that it is now much better organized and easier to read.

By the way, the link you gave for the modified file's whereabouts on your site seems to be broken. Would it be possible to put it up again, please? It is great to have it on the site here, but it would be nice to be able to search it alongside all the rest of my computing software information locally.

Thanks again,

Derek

Chris -

The new Archive looks great. Thanks very much for getting it up and running so quickly. It should be quite a draw :-).

Derek

Hi Derek,

No problem at all -- it's a great resource. I've restored the original zip at:

http://www.ideacruncher.com/tableoutput.zip

All of the carriage returns have been eliminated from the messages for easy importing.

I posted a second version with the carriage returns replaced with [RET], so they can be restored after importing:

http://www.ideacruncher.com/tableoutputwithreturns.zip

Regards,
Tom

Thanks a lot, Tom. Very helpful to have these locally.

All the best,

Derek