Re: PC: On archives, FAQs and the best possible use of time - human time is more valuable than machine time

[Jerry Jordak <jer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I wasn't going discuss this a lot here, but since Jeremy brought it up, 
here's just a few comments on his post:

First, you actually sat down and wrote all that? Wow.... :-)

Your comments about archiving "by hand": I'm actually using the tool 
MHonArc, which generates all of the HTML for me. Each of the three months 
of archives that I posted took 3-6 seconds each to generate. With a couple 
more scripts, I should have the manual archiving part down pretty quickly. 
Believe me, I don't plan to spend any more time on this than I have to. :-)

You did mention a FAQ....and while it seems most web site visitors don't 
know this, despite the link on the main page and nav bar, my site does have 
one at http://pc.smellycat.com/docs/faq.html. Mostly, though, I wrote it to 
cut down on repetitive e-mails to me (the site maintainer) instead of the 
mailing list. If anyone wants to take that list and run with it and 
generate a more thorough FAQ, let me know...I don't have a problem with that.

Also note that the archive is sorted by thread within each of the months. I 
could have put the entire list into one giant archive page, but the first 
four years generated an index page of a meg and a half, and that was even 
slow loading on my local PC, much less over a 56K modem.

Good comments, though. I'll see what the rest of the world thinks.

-JWJ