10-01-2003, 02:04 AM
[quote name='Viren' date='Sep 30 2003, 03:01 AM'] There are some independent efforts by others here (you know who you are) to whom we can provide content to store and categorize.
[/quote]
I am sure they know who they are. <img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='
' />
Well, I have a couple of different ways to get the whole thing going and a few design decisions to make.
One way is to get a printer friendly archival of the forum which is an HTML file which in turn is compressed
with gzip. Then create volumes each of which would fit onto a CD. Rough space calculations are as follows.
A full BRF TSP news and discussion forum (9 pages) has been compressed down to 130KB. This works out to
(rounding 130K down to 128K = 1/8 M) for easy calculation, one can fit about 4000 such forums on one CD of 500MB.
If you take out about 20% for overheads (which I will describe below), we are still talking 3000 BRF TSP forums on one CD.
On a DVD which is about 5GB, one can fit about 30000 such forums.
Yet another way is to dump the HTML into a PS format. Probably I can find an open source/free HTML2PS filter somewhere.
Two problem with PS format are - the archives could become larger than HTML archives, and secondly the user would need a PS viewer.
One quick experiment shows that PS format would require about 360K compressed.
A couple of design problems -
1. Forum numbering/naming conventions. I should be able to reverse engineer this without too much of a difficulty
as long as there is a method that can be seen.
2. Emoticons. Not sure how to handle them. I am thinking of archiving the images on to the CD volume and then change the image URLs
in the printer friendly HTML to relative paths. That way, when somebody downloads a CD image, all emoticons will be found without going to the web.
Only the external links will not be saved. For these, an internet connection must be active. On the other hand, this is fine because the copyright will
be followed quite rigorously.
I hope the above make sense to some people. I am inviting suggestions and possibly some PERL coding help.
[/quote]
I am sure they know who they are. <img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='
' />Well, I have a couple of different ways to get the whole thing going and a few design decisions to make.
One way is to get a printer friendly archival of the forum which is an HTML file which in turn is compressed
with gzip. Then create volumes each of which would fit onto a CD. Rough space calculations are as follows.
A full BRF TSP news and discussion forum (9 pages) has been compressed down to 130KB. This works out to
(rounding 130K down to 128K = 1/8 M) for easy calculation, one can fit about 4000 such forums on one CD of 500MB.
If you take out about 20% for overheads (which I will describe below), we are still talking 3000 BRF TSP forums on one CD.
On a DVD which is about 5GB, one can fit about 30000 such forums.
Yet another way is to dump the HTML into a PS format. Probably I can find an open source/free HTML2PS filter somewhere.
Two problem with PS format are - the archives could become larger than HTML archives, and secondly the user would need a PS viewer.
One quick experiment shows that PS format would require about 360K compressed.
A couple of design problems -
1. Forum numbering/naming conventions. I should be able to reverse engineer this without too much of a difficulty
as long as there is a method that can be seen.
2. Emoticons. Not sure how to handle them. I am thinking of archiving the images on to the CD volume and then change the image URLs
in the printer friendly HTML to relative paths. That way, when somebody downloads a CD image, all emoticons will be found without going to the web.
Only the external links will not be saved. For these, an internet connection must be active. On the other hand, this is fine because the copyright will
be followed quite rigorously.
I hope the above make sense to some people. I am inviting suggestions and possibly some PERL coding help.