Archiving an author's postings

The archive to which Gunner referred in his post,"Re: Trouble with cut-off operation on lathe" got me thinking. This archive

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was apparently patiently hand searched, assembled and edited. Does anyone know a way, using Google or any other means, to bulk archive the postings of a single author and save same to a CD. I'm talking about the individual, out-of-context messages, not the entire threads.

The contributions of the late Robert Bastow (Teenut) would be an obvious candidate. Or, if Harold Vordos could easily do this with his own postings pertaining to grinding, he would end up with the basis for a book on the subject. IMO, there have been several other contributors with a high wheat-to-chaff ratio and exceptional presentation skills.

David Merrill

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David Merrill
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Nick

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Nick Müller

Outstanding Idea!!!!

Marvelous even!!!

Id pay (cringe) for such CDs (some..not much..but some)

I wonder if some of the proceeds could be used to donate to one of Tnuts favorite charities or somesuch. Not a bad memorial..and a national treasure saved for posterity.

"The Collected Wit and Wisdom of Teenut"

Something to put next to Lautards in the bathroom to browse though. I think that would tickle Robert immensely.

Gunner

The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.

In the past few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology has emerged in England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence, and admirable stoicism that carried the English through the war years . It has been replaced by a constant whine of excuses, complaints, and special pleading. The collapse of the British character has been as swift and complete as the collapse of British power.

Theodore Dalrymple,

Reply to
Gunner

Unless I'm missing something, doing an advanced Google Groups search on author, "Robert Bastow" in "rec.crafts.metalworking" returns 2860 'threads' containing one or more messages from Teenut buried among numerous other messages. From these entire threads one would have to copy Teenut's individual messages and paste them into a text file; certainly possible, but a laborious process.

Can anyone identify a more efficient way; possibly some of you in the Linux world, or are your Web/Usenet readers as insulated from scripting tools as seems to be the current case in the Windows world?

David Merrill

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David Merrill

I could certainly write a script which would send an HTTP query to google, dump the result into a file, and postprocess the file, but why? You think it's going somewhere? Who would pay anything for stuff they can themselves google up for free? I don't have anything against Teenut, but he was just one old machinist with a lot of opinions, and there are lots of others who are still alive and can answer specific questions I need answered. After you get past the basics of stuff like how to cut metal, how to do parting in a lathe, what would you use it for?

So you're basically wanting to do a lot of work to compile something useful only for beginners.

Sounds like a lousy business proposition to me ..

GWE

David Merrill wrote:

Reply to
Grant Erwin

According to David Merrill :

Hmm ... "lynx" is a text-only browser, which can work well for the task, and can be coupled to shell scripts to do quite complex things.

"wget" can download entire trees of web pages, or individual files, so a combination of lynx to find thinks, a shell script to run it, and wget to download to files could do it nicely.

However, for Teenut's postings, the way that *I* would go for it is to download the relevant years from the archives at the site which holds the official (and long un-updated) FAQs for the newsgroup. At the University of Wyoming (something.uyo.edu), IIRC. A pointer to it can be found in Scott Logan's weekly (or is it bi-weekly) FAQ posting. The early years are zipped, the later ones gzipped, IIRC. And the most recent years have not been archived, but that happened after Teenut passed on, so all that he posted (under several usernames) is there.

Once you have it all, then you need to build up scripts to separate the articles into individual messages, and then select the ones you need and tie them together into a single file.

Downloading them can take a *long* time -- even with a fast net feed. I think that they are throttled by the "uyo" site.

Early years fit into a single file. Later years were split into two, and I think some of the very last archived were split into three files as the volume of the newsgroup grew.

Beware, however, that in one or two years, there were some usenet-posted virus programs archived -- along with everything else. Thus you probably would not want to do this on a Windows box. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

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DoN. Nichols

Might just be in the search terms.

Then print into pdf or copy and paste into a text editor and do a save as.

IIRC, Robert's user name was sorted in a news reader from a national archive and was saved. IIRC, Scott Logan did that. Might be on lathe.com page ? hum.

Martin Martin Eastburn @ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net NRA LOH & Endowment Member NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder IHMSA and NRA Metallic Silhouette maker & member

David Merrill wrote:

Reply to
Martin H. Eastburn

Who said anything about a business ? How much faith have you in the future of free Google groups searches (remember Dejanews?) or in the future of Usenet newsgroups for that matter ?

I thought I made it excruciatingly clear that I'd like to avoid a lot of work :-) I, personally, would thoroughly enjoy reading a compendium of certain contributors to rec.crafts.metalworking using Teenut as one outstanding example; and I don't consider myself as strictly a beginner, IMHO.

And what have you got against beginners ? I seem to recall you being an HSM beginner not so long ago.

David Merrill

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David Merrill

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