Addendum to use of mha-preview

["John Cottingham" <ahomeboy2000@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Non-standard Installation of Mhonarc presents several opportunities. Non 
server root privileges prevent perl from knowing the paths to the Mhonarc 
executables.

Use of mha-preview in a non-root privilege installation presents two 
problems.

Earl has provided a work around in the mha-preview that allows the path to 
the Libraries to be made known.

# Uncomment and modify the following if MHonArc libraries were not
# installed in a perl's site directory or in perl's normal search path.
#use lib qw(/path/to/mhonarc/libraries);

Uncommenting and modifying the path as written results in a runtime error. 
To correct the error the path has to be closed with a forward slash

use lib qw(/path/to/mhonarc/libraries/);

Initiating mha-preview to read a text file with message separators could use 
a command line like this:

/home/pieno/bin/mhnew/mha-preview -rcfile 
/home/pieno/bin/mhnew/.mhrcfile -spammode -umask 022 -msgsep 
"========================================================================="  
-add 7B.txt -outdir /home/pieno/public_html/archive folder name/

Notice I have moved mha-preview out of the examples folder to the main 
folder where the .mhrcfile is located also. On some installations it is 
better to use KISS rather than having neat and tidy.

A good way to test your coding is to set up a test folder in a public area 
and feed it with spam since it is always with us. My mailing list archives 
are just sent once a day so tweaking rather than taking hours can take 
weeks.

Oh, before I forget the .mhrcfile needs a modification to be able to display 
the brief text.

<!-- A compact listing template  -->
<LITEMPLATE>
<li><font color="#000000" size="4" face=times new roman,arial, helvetica, 
sans-serif"><strong>$SUBJECT:40$</strong> <em>($NUMFOLUP$)</em> 
<em>$FROMNAME$</em><br>$X-MSG-PREVIEW$</font>
</li>
</LITEMPLATE>

The modification is the addition of the $X-MSG-PREVIEW$

In mha-preview, I reduced the length of the snippet to 128 from the default 
256. Your mileage may vary.

Earl, thanks.

John Cottingham






--------------------------------------------------
From: "Earl Hood" <earl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2011 7:53 AM
To: <mhonarc-users@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: mha-preview and RSS

> 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