Re: mha-preview and RSS

[Earl Hood <earl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 4:38 PM, John Cottingham
<ahomeboy2000@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I have upgraded from .10 to .18 and have for years looked longingly at using
> mha-preview on the maillist index. The documentation seems sparse and I
> haven't a clue how to implement it.
>
> mhonarc is now called from .procmail using the .mhrcfile. About the only
> switches I use in the .mhrcfile are <reverse> and <multipg>

I recommend using a cron-based invocation model vs calling mhonarc
as mail arrives.  The later does not scale well for high volume
lists and/or larger archives.

If you intend to keep your archives for an indefinite period of
time, it is recommended to break them up into periods to avoid
a single mhonarc archive getting too large.

mharc, <http://www.mhonarc.org/mharc/>, provides scripts that
already do this, but you can always roll your own.

> I assume the folks that are using mha-preview are also creating an rss index
> page.

RSS is an XML format.  Do a search for "RSS" against the
mhonarc-users archive, and you will get some useful past posts on
this subject:

http://www.mhonarc.org/archive/html/mhonarc-users/

mha-preview is intended to be invoked just like mhonarc.  The only
real difference is it provides support for the use of the $X-MSG-PREVIEW$
resource variable in layout resources to contains the first X number
characters of the message body (defaults to 256).

Running,

  mha-preview -man

provides information about the script.

If you plan on using it, I recommend testing it out first on
some sample data.  The script has not been touched in a long
time.

--ewh