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(ATM) Note from the archive admin.

Hello everyone!  As Robert Fields has announced, I am the new ATM Archive
administrator.  Any questions or comments about the archives or search engine
should be addressed to me at andy@www.system.missouri.edu. 

First, I'd like to publicly thank Robert for all the extremely hard work that
has gone into making this list arguably the best ATM resource on the net. 
Without his efforts, our community would not be as strong today.  Robert and
I have known each other electronicly for many years, and finially met face to
face at this year's Riverside Telescope Makers Conference.  I also met our
new list administrator Mel Bartels there as well.  With Mel's guidance...  we
will continue in Robert's tradition of excellence. 

There are a couple of issues with the archives and search that I would 
like to address: 

1.  The first issue is how to keep the web version of your messages from
reformatting any tables or ascii-graphics.  If you will add the tag
<html><pre> to your message, on a line by itself, just before your table
or graph and then put a </html></pre> on a blank line after your text... 
the system will not try to HTMLize your text.  Something like this: 

<html><pre>
Blah blah blah           5.4372          9.259      8.2394
Blah blah blah           5.4372          9.259      8.2394
</html></pre>

or

<html><pre>
\      /
 \    /
  \  /
   \/
   /\
  /  \
 /    \
/      \
</html></pre>

Doing this will keep your text from being htmlized and should also display
the enclosed text in a non-proportional font on most browsers.  What this tag
actually does is make the archive-program treat everything inside the <html>
as actual HTML, so I suppose you could use it to include links or whatever. 
Please be aware that everyone subscribed to the mail list will have to look
at the html code in your message... so please don't get too carried away. 

2. The next issue deals with the new search facility.  At the beginning of
each message in the archive are html-links to the previous and next messages.
Try as I might... I can not get the search program to ignore these links. 
This causes searches to come back with more hits on a keyword than are
actually there.  Especially noticeable when searching for an author's name. 
Not much I can do about it using the current version of the indexing program. 

For those interested in the mechanics... a unix mailbox, setup just for this
purpose, is read in by a program called "hypermail".  This program creates a
html file for each message and a table of contents files sorted by author,
subject, and date.  Then, a program called "swish" takes all the files in the
ATM directory structure and creates an index of all the words.  A script
written in perl does the actual search and returns the results to you. 

Again, if you have any questions, comments, or problems with either the
archives or the search, please send them to andy@www.system.missouri.edu. 

Clear Skies and Happy Grinding!

Andy Steere - andy@www.system.missouri.edu
http://www.system.missouri.edu/andy/              <- my home page
http://www.system.missouri.edu/atm/               <- the ATM Archives