[Discuss] list archive viewer

[tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)]

Tom Metro wrote:
> A better approach, if they'd go for it, would be getting
> mail-archive.com to enhance their platform to permit some list-specific
> [emedding].

I sent an email to mail-archive.com to see if they'd be willing to
support this.

I see Gmane now offers a form of rudimentary embedding, which you can
see applied on our mailing list page:

http://blu.wikispaces.com/mailing+lists

where an IFRAME box is used to show the 5 most recent threads on the
list. If we wanted to increase the visibility of the mailing list, this
could be put on the blu.org home page.

(Gmane covers this feature in their FAQ (http://gmane.org/faq.php) under
"Can I include a box displaying the latest topics on my mailing list on
my web page?" And the info page for any list, such as BLU Discuss
(http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.linux.boston.discuss), shows
the ready-to-paste HTML snippet for doing this.)


> mail-archive.com offers up a different sort of integration possibility.
> They provide the algorithm they use to calculate an archive post's URL,
> so you can add this code to your mailing list manager and have the
> "permalink" for archived message appear in the footer of the distributed
> message.

Gmane supports the same idea using the message ID:

  How do I link to a specific article if I just know the Message-ID?
  http://mid.gmane.org/1234567890.1234567890 at example.com

which should be even easier to integrate into a mailing list manager.

Unfortunately it doesn't appear that message ID is one of the
substitution variables that mailman provides for including in message
body headers or footers.
http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-admin/node18.html

Otherwise this would be a trivial addition.

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/