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Grex > Coop11 > #128: Be a part of a website, write columns (This is NOT Spam) | |
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sarmad
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Be a part of a website, write columns (This is NOT Spam)
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Oct 8 03:08 UTC 1999 |
Hi everyone, this is Sarmad Gilani, remember me? :)
Anyway, wanted to ask all of you here if you would like to be a part of my
website, called CyberPakistan (www.cyberpakistan.com)
I'm looking for an e-Columnist, or someone wanting to write columns online
to be shown on the site. We have many resources, we just need people
toContribute! Anyone is welcome, but just let us know who you are and stuff
like that. :)
To contact me, click on the Contact Us link and send us an email, or just send
it from Grex to : info@cyberpakistan.com
Thanks!
Sarmad
P.S. I decided to post this here because I know of many people from
India/Pakistan and perhaps othes who might be intersted. This is by no means
"spamming"
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| 55 responses total. |
remmers
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response 1 of 55:
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Oct 8 15:14 UTC 1999 |
(This item would get a wider audience if it were posted in the Agora
conference. You can ask the fairwitness of Agora, login "katie", to
link it if you want it to appear there.)
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don
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response 2 of 55:
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Oct 8 23:14 UTC 1999 |
I have doubts to the apropriateness of this item being in this conference.
Anyone else agree?
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albaugh
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response 3 of 55:
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Oct 9 06:31 UTC 1999 |
Yeah, technically it's off topic. But we can be friendly and helpful
for a moment or two... :-)
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lilmo
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response 4 of 55:
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Oct 12 23:51 UTC 1999 |
Perhaps the 'writing' cf, too? And if he starts looking for someone to write
on a particular topic, there would be other relevant cf's.
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don
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response 5 of 55:
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Oct 13 01:27 UTC 1999 |
The writing cf is dead. Completely dead. I posted The Story of my Life in
there around two months ago, and that's been the most recent posting. Which
brings me to the next issue: Why don't we just kill all (or most) of the
non-agora/coop/staff/helpe conferences, since they just take up room?
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gull
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response 6 of 55:
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Oct 13 02:46 UTC 1999 |
There are a lot of conferences that I read that only see action every month
or two. That doesn't mean noone's reading them, and it doesn't mean the
material that's there isn't interesting reading or a valuable reference. My
take is that the old postings in relatively inactive conferences are
something that, once we delete, we can't replace; unless we really need the
space, I'd sure think twice about removing them.
I was poking through the hardware conference, recently (which isn't really
inactive, but the principle is the same) and I realized that a lot of the
older stuff in there is getting to be historically interesting, at least for
us computer geeks. Some of that knowledge is also getting hard to find for
people who *do* still tinker with old boxes.
I understand the urge to 'tidy things up,' but I don't think those
conferences are hurting anything.
---- Rambling follows ----
I guess I've gotten sensitive about this lately after seeing 'artifacts' of
sorts being thrown away. A guy I know in California sent me, a while back,
some pictures of an old Cray sitting in the rain on the loading dock behind
one of NASA's buildings. That handbuilt piece of computer history wasn't
going to a museum; no, it was going to a metal recycler to be scrapped out.
Vector-math supercomputers are about to disappear entirely from the face of
the earth -- they're being phased out everywhere. I think it's sad to see a
piece of history being unthinkingly thrown away.
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mdw
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response 7 of 55:
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Oct 13 05:44 UTC 1999 |
The world is full of packrats and neatfreaks.
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scott
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response 8 of 55:
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Oct 13 12:34 UTC 1999 |
(The NSA's museum of cryptography near Baltimore has a Cray on display)
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cmcgee
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response 9 of 55:
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Oct 13 16:23 UTC 1999 |
I sometimes search very inactive conferences for old information. And a
couple conferences that I'm fw in don't see action for weeks/months at a time.
But I do scan them *every single time I sign on*. So I'd prefer inactive cfs
to stay around.
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gull
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response 10 of 55:
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Oct 13 19:17 UTC 1999 |
Re #7: Yeah...it's pretty obvious which category I'm in, I guess. ;>
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don
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response 11 of 55:
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Oct 13 21:01 UTC 1999 |
re #6 and 9, have you seen how dead the writing cf is? There hasn't been any
activity in there for around a year. I'm talking about scrapping those
conferences -- not moderately active cf's like hardware and jellyware.
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scott
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response 12 of 55:
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Oct 13 22:12 UTC 1999 |
But why? We have plenty of disk for conferences.
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davel
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response 13 of 55:
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Oct 14 02:11 UTC 1999 |
In many cases, sooner or later someone will try them who will liven them up,
for a while. I also value our ability to hang on to inactive conferences.
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gull
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response 14 of 55:
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Oct 14 03:00 UTC 1999 |
Re #11: Maybe you should explain why you feel this is important? I'm not
sure what inactive conferences are harming.
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devnull
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response 15 of 55:
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Oct 14 19:57 UTC 1999 |
I would be very unhappy if the writing conference went away. I suspect it
has some interesting material that I would enjoy reading if I ever find
the time to carefully read it...
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dpc
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response 16 of 55:
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Oct 14 20:01 UTC 1999 |
One drawback of lots of inactive conferences is that it gives newbies
the impression that Grex is largely dead.
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scott
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response 17 of 55:
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Oct 14 20:36 UTC 1999 |
Perhaps it also gives a sense of history and is a useful reference.
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i
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response 18 of 55:
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Oct 14 22:08 UTC 1999 |
Getting more activity into more of grex's conferences sounds much
better to me than reaping the inactive ones.
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don
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response 19 of 55:
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Oct 14 22:36 UTC 1999 |
re 14, 16 is largely correct -- I remember getting an account here for the
first time and thinking that grex was a ghost community due to the dead cf's.
They also wasted my time when I posted some stuff in them and kept coming back
to check for responses, until I realized that they were dead. Sure, the
conferences aren't hurting anything -- but there's almost no point in having
them around; we should just tar.gz them so that they'll be available for
anyone trying to catch up on "history".
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devnull
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response 20 of 55:
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Oct 14 23:48 UTC 1999 |
Re #19: picospan has a mechanism that lets you say `next', and the system
will automatically check conferences looking for new items until it finds
one
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krj
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response 21 of 55:
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Oct 15 03:18 UTC 1999 |
resp:16 :: I've floated a proposal before that we find some way to
segregate the dead conferences so that newbies don't find them
unless they explicitly say: show me the dead conferences.
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gull
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response 22 of 55:
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Oct 15 04:03 UTC 1999 |
Only problem I can see with #21 is it pretty well ensures any dead
conferences stay that way.
Could any newbie, having been plopped into Agora, really get the impression
that Grex is a dead, quiet place?
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remmers
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response 23 of 55:
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Oct 15 22:09 UTC 1999 |
Being something of a minimalist when it comes to bureaucratic structure
and control, I'm not too fond of the idea of zapping conferences for
inactivity, adminstratively labeling conferences as "dead", or whatnot.
But I like putting power in the hands of the people, so what do folks
think about providing a tool that people could use to find active
conferences, if that's what they want to do? Technically, it's
feasible. Here's one way to do it.
(1) Create a dummy account called "jarjar" or something and have it join
every conference on Grex.
(2) Write a front-end shell script that pipes commands into Picospan
which has jarjar run through all the conferences, doing a "fixseen" on
each one. This will give jarjar a "caught-up" participation file for
every conference.
(3) Write a back-end shell script or program that captures the output
from Picospan produced by running the front-end script. This will
include all the "number of new responses and brand-new items" lines that
Picospan prints when you join conferences. Have the back-end save these
numbers in a file in some reasonable format and throw away everything
else, thus generating a report on activity in every conference.
(4) Running the pipeline
front-end | picospan | back-end
once a week from the jarjar account will produce a report on conference
activity in the last week. This could be done by a cron job. Have a
command that people could run which reads the weekly jarjar file and
displays a report of conference activity, with options to show them the
"five most active conferences", "ten most active conferences", "all
conferences", or whatever. Have a CGI that makes the command avaiable
via the web, for the benefit of Backtalk users.
Comments?
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lilmo
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response 24 of 55:
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Oct 15 22:52 UTC 1999 |
You want it to run fixseen every time?
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