Date: Sun, 10 Mar 1996 01:41:12 -0800
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From: Steve Hoge <steveh@emu.com>
Subject: "Archive" Hell
For the confused (of whom I am sometimes one) -
The term "archive" seems to be tossed around fastly and loosely within
our vanagon@lenti context. Check to see if I've got this straight:
When I read Skip's web page version of the list (you don't have all this
correspondence cluttering up your in-box, do you? ;-) at the URL:
http:/www.automatrix.com/~skip/volkswagen/vanagon-list
there is always a link at the top of the page labeled "Other mail
archives" which simply points to the HTML page that contains the
previous few hundred mail messages. Each of those has a "Other mail
archives" link which points to *its* previous page, and so on ad
infinitum, or ad filesystem, as it were.
So that's ONE kind of "archives." Then there's the way-cool searchable
gopher archives that Gerry maintains at:
gopher://halfdan/med/umn/edu:70/11/Miscellaneous/Vanagon
These are *all* the mail messages since the list started (right? I'm a
relative newbie...) These are organized in, I guess, chronological
order, but I never browse them that way: I use the gopher search engine
to locate "keywords of interest" (ie, "Syncro"!) so I don't have to slog
through thousands of FFFFriday funnies, for instance. These archives
have often saved me from re-posting the same tiresome questions that
have already been answered numerous times (ahem.) In addition, under
Gerry's gopher site there's also:
gopher://halfdan.med.umn.edu:70/11/Miscellaneous/Vanagon/Files
which *I* think of as an archive of all kinds of great resources: model
summaries, test drive reports, how-to articles, technical bulletins, and
horror stories. I sometimes (erroneously) refer this collection to
people as the Vanagon list "FAQ", but Skip has another FAQ page at:
http://www.automatrix.com/~skip/volkswagen/faq.html
He also has a Technical Tips page which is a collection of links back
into the halfdan gopher site "Files". Of course there's plenty of other
Volkswagenabilia that continues to sprout all over the web, including
yet another VW "archive" at:
http://www.oden.se/~fh/TVWA.HTML
So if you *really* want to do the thorough research on your own before
asking a YAFAQ (Yet Another Frequently Asked Question), there are plenty
of places to look. Or, heck, just post it to the list anyway - we're
friendly!
Steve Hoge
'77 AutoLoaf
'89 Syncro GL