NYCPHP Meetup

[Jayesh Sheth]

Hello all,

I have been wanting to search through the treasure of information 
contained in the NYPHP archives from 2002 to date.
Thankfully, the guys at nyphp.org made the whole archive available as a 
(Unix mail) mbox file.

I used a utility from Fookes software (fookes.com) called Mailbag to 
extract these files as a big csv file. (Originally I thought I would use 
Mailbag's built-in search feature, but that proved too cumbersome to 
use. Plus, I wanted to customize the output of the search.)

 I then imported that file into a MySQL database table, and enabled 
MySQL fulltext search for that table. (I had to do a manual search and 
replace with another Fookes program, Notetab, to get certain character 
escaped. E.g. quotes and dollar signs.)

I then added on a PHP search interface to it.

With a lot of luck I seem to have got a basic version working. Having 
this large set of information publicly searchable will no doubt be 
useful to others.

 For example:
http://www.ceruleansky.com/nyphp_mail/index.php?q=xml-rpc

I am not sure if it works perfectly yet (since it is just a day or two's 
work). (I  built on some functions which I had written before, so it 
went relatively fast ...)  It currently returns a set of up to 25 
matches. There is no built-in support for displaying messages by thread, 
or for fine grained searching (by field or with boolean expressions).

Please try out this alpha version and let me know if it works and if it 
is of use.

Best Regards,
- Jay Sheth