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Looper's Delight
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At 2:55 PM -0800 1/4/01, Todd Quincy wrote: >This is primarily for Kim but I thought others may benefit. > >Kim, I would like to know how I would be create a email-chatroom like the >this one for my site. Is this a program I can buy, how much space will it >eat up. The Looper's Delight mailing list runs on Smartlist, a free and open-sourced mailing list application that has been around for many years. Smartlist runs on unix and linux servers, and if you are reasonably comfortable with that it is not hard to set up. I run it on an x86 based linux server. I like Smartlist because it is very fast and very easy to customize any way you like. It readily offers most options you might want for a list, but then there is a user community that has created many additional add-ons over the years. And if you get more adventurous you can code your own. Smartlist is based on procmail, a free and open-sourced mail scripting language that is widely used on unix and linux servers for mail processing. You can find info on both at http://www.procmail.org. eGroups is probably easier to set up, but then as listowner you are giving up control over your's and the list's destiny. You will be at the mercy of their policies and the future viability of their shakey dotcom business plan. Personally, I'm not willing to do that. Indeed, I even took Looper's Delight out of the world of retail web-hosting for similar reasons. Everywhere I tried I found the services to be far too unreliable and the quality of support to be incompetent on a good day. You never know when a host company is going to blink out of business without warning, or sell your accounts to some other company that has no idea what they are doing. (that happened to me twice.) Some of you probably remember a couple years ago when the site was completely offline for significant chunks of time due to lame web hosting companies. I couldn't tolerate that any longer. Also, with a site as large as Looper's Delight, the incremental charges I was forced to pay as things grew became exhorbitant. Especially considering how lousy the service was and that you usually share the server with hundreds of other sites doing who knows what. So instead I got my own server at a co-location facility, and partnered with a couple of other mid-sized sites to share the cost. I've not had any problems since. We have a whole server to ourselves, we have total control over it and can do anything we want, and we have plenty of breathing room to grow, and it is cheaper for sites this large than any retail web-host. (in fact, we can fit another partner, if anybody with a large site is interested.) Another benefit to running your own list: If you are a business, or you want a more professional feel to your site, or you want a more integrated user community, keeping it all together on one site is definitely the way to go. The list will bring people to the rest of your site and vice-versa. Likewise, archives of the list will bring in new users from search engines, who will then likely explore the rest of your site. This will increase traffic and participation at your site exponentially, while giving users a more complete experience. (Looper's Delight now gets about 400,000 hits a month from about 60,000 different visitors, mainly due to the archive - and it keeps growing like a weed....) You won't get that effect with an outside service like eGroups. But if you just want to throw together some temporary discussion list and you don't care about such things, eGroups is probably easier to deal with. Some other technical details for you geeks out there: the Looper's Delight mailing list archive is automatically put together using Mhonarc, a wonderful mail-to-html convertor. (http://www.mhonarc.org) The search engine is an older version of glimpse, which is nice and fast, although a bit buggy. (we built in some work-arounds for the bugs....) At the top is a program tying glimpse and mhonarc together called "wilma". Wilma is functional but cosmetically ugly. I've been meaning to get in and give it a face-lift but haven't gotten around to it. Such changes are easy though, because again: wilma is open-sourced and free! You can find all three of those through the mhonarc site. hope this was interesting, kim ______________________________________________________________________ Kim Flint | Looper's Delight kflint@loopers-delight.com | http://www.loopers-delight.com