Manx [was: Re: scanning booklets for archive]

From: Paul Williams <paul_at_frixxon.co.uk>
Date: Wed Jul 23 13:00:01 2003

Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Paul Williams wrote:
>
>>Manx is intended to cover more than just DEC documents, but I've been
>>concentrating on populating those first; there are over 4000 manuals in
>>the catalogue so far, of which over 1500 are online.
>
>
> I've never heard of your effort before, but I just checked it out and it's
> terrific! You should definitely put up a form for user submissions. Or
> in the very least, setup other people with administration rights so you
> can have a cadre of dedicated folks scouring the internet and reporting
> their findings of online manuals to the database.

Thanks. I should have announced it properly here but I never got round
to it, and Antonio has been citing it weekly anyway!

Now I've got broadband and moved the local copy of my site from work to
home, I'll have more time to work on it. The search engine currently has
limitations that will be improved in the next version (so that ToC and
full text searching will work, for one thing). I'll look at an admin
facility and bulk upload as well.

The feature that has really got my interest is adding an API like that
used for Google or Amazon. If you're into web applications at all and
you've not seen either of these, you should take a look. Adding an API
would mean that Manx's database could be used by other applications
without using Manx's front end. At the simplest level, other
applications could just send an ordinary HTTP request to Manx and get a
well-formed XML response, which can be easily parsed into whatever form
you want for your application.

I won't say more here because we'll be veering off-topic into web
programming and some people will be expecting timescale information.
I'll stick more info up on the site soon.

- Paul
Received on Wed Jul 23 2003 - 13:00:01 BST