🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <38598D55.EDD9C5DB@ozemail.com.au>, Warren Murray 
<elefantman@ozemail.com.au> wrote:

>My newspaper can export page content from QuarkXpress as text files (one
>story = one file) using Press2Go. But we have no way of indexing and
>archiving it into a searchable library/database.

What we did is create a MacPerl script to turn the text files into basic 
HTML files. Really just adding the '< P >' code to the end of paragraphs 
and adding HTML headers and footers and .html to the end of the file 
names. Then we set up an internal web site with folders by week, month 
and year for all these text files. The idea is to set up a searchable 
internal web site, since this is something most people are familiar with.

You have a couple of choices for software:

* You can get Mac based web servers for free. Then we set up and 
indexing cgi so that people could do web based searches of the file 
collection. Apple had a search cgi who's name excapes me right now but 
that is available for free as well (or was available).

* AppleShareIP can do indexing for web searches, but this costs money.

* WebStar also has a search engine (I think), but this costs money.

* Unix + Apache + Excite for web servers (or some other free web 
indexing and search tool), which is can be free (Linux instead of a 
commercial Unix) but not Mac-based.

* Virginia Systems (there are other text indexing companies) has text 
indexing software that can be web based and even includes a quark module 
so you could archive and search whole quark pages (I think). But this 
costs money, indeed it might be the most expensive.

We did choice one for a while and it worked, we would have moved up to 
choice three (we didn't really need all the services that ASIP include) 
but then we found an unused Unix box and fitted it with apache and 
excite for web servers. This has worked well for us, we have text going 
back to 1995 and the searches are still fast.

But if I had a spare Mac I'd probably get the commercial version of 
WebStar (make sure they reall do indexing and searches) and start an 
internal web server. We even use our server now for stuff like 
announcements, in-house instruction manuals and we are looking at web 
based group calendars. Cool stuff!

By the way, eight newsgroups is way too much. I've shortened the list 
and set a followup-to to alt.publish.newspaper.

DRouse