Guys - as a follow-up to my earlier post about possibly relocating from our
beloved home here on FR (due to the recent 'zotting' episode and a general
lack of ability to FIND ANYTHING in and among the piles of content)..
Seems like the consensus is that we wanna stay put - which is great, since FR is a tremendous wealth of info and a great news source. BUT..it ALSO seems that a lot of us want a way to "save off"/archive important info, and organize it in a way we can quickly find things if we need it. (Remember how many times we went looking for a certain article and never, ever could find where in the heck it was across more than 50,000 posts on TM?)
Since so many seem to want this, I started thinking about ways we might be
able to put it together. Here's what I came up with:
- It would be reasonably easy to setup a way to save off key articles from FR
WITHOUT having to copy and paste them. (I was playing around with this
earlier, and think I came up with a way to just feed in the article # and
have a "bot" goto FR and pull the content in automatically).
- Once we have a way to automatically save articles, we could put them
together by Subject (eg: WMD, Threats, Russia, Incidents, etc). We could
also indicate what geographic area (if any) is involved. So, if there was
an Incident at Philly Airport where a guy ran through security, we could
stash the article under "Incidents" and "Philadelphia".
- The only thing we'd need is someone to do what Flutters has already done
with the great summary that was put together for articles over the past days -
and that's read through the Thread and decide which articles we want to
keep track of. From there, we'd have a Web screen where you choose the
Thread from a pull-down menu (eg: TM Thread 15) and Post# and the program
would pull in the article automatically - or create a link back to FR if we
wanted to do that instead. Then, there'd be some check-boxes or menus to
pick the Subject and the Area. That's it. No copy and paste. No re-keying.
Just pick the Thread and Post #, categorize it by checking some boxes..and..
voila! It's saved.
If we had a collection of articles in the archive, we could have a "My Threat
Matrix" page (ala My Yahoo) that breaks things down into Topic Sections and
displays them..instead of "Entertainment News from E!", you'd have "Borders",
or "Incidents" or "WMD", etc Sections.
We could also sort by date, SEARCH (Alleluia!) by Subject and Area (eg:
Philly, NK, Saudi Arabia, London, etc).
What do you guys think? To do this, we'd need:
- A list of Subjects and Geographic Areas that we want to track..kind of a WOT
"card catalog!" I've started to come up with some ideas here, but plz feel free to
toss out some ideas!
- Me to write the code (hmmm..more work..let's rethink that! :) )
- Someone who's willing to read the thread regularly (we all do that anyway)
and pick out the post #s that we want to save - and then decide what the
Subject and Area is. (Note: no rekeying here..I can have a "bot" pull the
articles in automatically).
- A site (I already registered threatmatrix.info earlier, when I thought we
might want our own BB). .NET and .COM were taken already. (If I put this
together, I'd want to do it in Java, so we need a host that will support
this).
Anyway..sorry for the enormously long post, but I heard a bunch of people say
that we want to stay at FR, BUT..we have over 50,000 posts and no way to
easily find things, tie info together from earlier events, etc. So, when we
have a mouse problem..time to build a mousetrap!
Thanks for listening to me ramble. Plz let me know what you all think!
Sorry for the formatting on that long post..I wrote it offline and pasted it into FR..preview looked OK, but I see it "gorked" a bit when posted.
This is an excellent idea. I have been saving articles I find that I think are worth saving in my bookmarks in categories and subcategories.
I've been hesitant to open links recently because my computer has been freezing up and I have to shut it off at the power strip several times a day. This occurs when I try to follow links. The reason I bring this up is because I'd like to help, but this handicaps my efforts.
A cron wget could get it all. A decent perl script could toss the posts. A postgresql DB could handle the storage. Maybe a PHP front end for searching.
Perhaps some folks that have the time/inclination (I would be willing to do this) can take a particular previous thread (or part of a thread) and archive the pertinent information.
we could have a "My Threat Matrix" page (ala My Yahoo)
Does this mean it would be on Yahoo? I am hesitant to go to Yahoo because of the cookies. But if Yahoo is the best way to go, so be it. Excellent idea, please keep me posted.