Re: Qn about a interesting but slight mis-use of mhonarc

[Jym Dyer <jym@econet.org>]

> What I have in mind is basically to modify the "index" page so
> that it contains all or some of the content from the email.
> This way running mhonarc on an inbox will create just an index
> page listing the mails and the contents of each mail, and we
> should end up with something that looks quite like a weblog

=v= Funny, I'm working on exactly the same thing.  MHONARC
really is ideal for this application.  In fact, it makes it an
email-updated blog really easy, allows you to do things like add
*old* messages to a blog (I've got stuff posted to Usenet in the
early 1990s, for example), and of course you get to use any mail
application you want, which tend to be far more developed than
blogger software.

=v= MHONARC doesn't have a means to make an index page, but you
can use Perl to do this sort of thing:

  (1) Parse out the "header" information.  You can grab this
      from <!--X-Subject: ... --> and <!--X-Date: ... -->
      comments (I cheat and just assume it's all "From: Jym").
      Then make a blog-style header.

  (2) Grab everything from <!--X-Body-of-Message-> through
      <!--X-Body-of-Message-End--> and put it in the index.

=v= I was able to whip together a proto-blog in a few hours.
I haven't gone live with it, because I've raised the bar for
myself a little higher:  I want to make a distinction for my
blog that I've seen on no other, between entries that are
worthy of archiving and those that are not.  That'll take a
few more hours, I think.
    <_Jym_>