[Coco] Delphi archives on coco3.com

[Roger Taylor]

Here's a treat for you!

http://www.coco3.com/community/category/archives/delphi/


Well, this is a start... almost 1,550 Delphi posts for December 1993 
alone was imported into coco3.com.  This breaks down into 309 
original or lost posts, each having any number of comments.

Although the import was successful, this was only a test run.  The 
messages show the wrong dates (on purpose), and the comments are not 
nesting like I originally wanted them to, as the XML attempted to do.

Instead, all comments under a given post are in the order they were 
posted on Delphi.  This is not hard to follow, as most people either 
quoted a person before them or replied right to the post right before theirs.

I have a bunch of other Delphi posts to run through my converter, but 
unless they are all combined before converting, there's a chance of 
having the occasional broken thread.  Even so, comments to that lost 
post will still be found under that post, which becomes the new 
parent of the thread.  You probably won't even notice, or even care.

I take it that Delphi was very busy if there were this many postings 
for just one month, and I'm not even sure it's for the whole month.

What I need is More Delphi digest files!


How did I do this conversion?  I first have to manually go through 
the files and remove any "more?" prompts or other garbage somebody 
might have ASCII-captured while online.  Any Vt-52/100/ANSI escape 
sequences have to be removed (there was about 20 or so in the Dec 
1993 files, no biggie), then all of the .txt files are merged 
together, all posts separated by a line of -*- then run through my 
converter app.

The converter app crunches like crazy looking for posts with no 
parents, moving those to a new table, then going through all parented 
posts (replies), and inserting them under their parent.  Each message 
in this table contains all the pieces of information like topic, 
date, category, date/time, body, parent, id, etc.

Eventually an XML generator runs through all the posts, stopping at 
each Parent post and then checking for any replies after it, 
outputting the WordPress XML code for each type of message.

It wasn't easy - but the hardest part is OVER.  Now the same utility 
can be used to help bring in the Compuserve archives, or whatever else.

Please Submit these historic archives or point me in the right 
direction to find them?


P.S. the coco3.com blog naviation will be improved greatly, 
especially the left sidebar with the category listing that doesn't 
expand/collapse yet.

Hang in there!
-- 
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~ While I have seen Many annoying taglines over the years, I've never 
really complained, but here's mine:
~ Roger Taylor
~ http://www.americafedup.com