NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2010 Feb 7, 18:17 -0800
Hi Gary.
With a very small number of exception, every attached or linked file in the archives is associated with an actual NavList message. So let's say you once uploaded some document with "AFPAM" in the name. Just search the message archives normally by entering AFPAM in the search box on the main page here: fer3.com/arc. These search results are generated by google's indexing system so it's not always complete but if you try a couple of different search terms you will usually get what you're looking for. Note that this search is a standard site-specific google search, so you have access to some useful options. On the results page, click "Show Options". Then, just an example, click the link that says "Past week". This will show results that have been found by google during the past week. The google bots visit the NavList archive approximately once every thirty seconds so the index is generally current (I used to find those frequent robot visits annoying but I now use them to fire off various processes like updating the latest messages).
Curiously, google seems to maintain only a small fraction of the actual images from the NavList archive in their image search capability (distinct from text search). So if you want to scroll through a visual index, you can try the one that I wrote which is located on the main NavList page here:
http://www.fer3.com/arc/imgviewer.aspx?i=2000&N=2000
[the value of "i" in this address sets the starting point in the files list, the value of "N" is the maximum number that would be displayed. With these values, you will see files starting from the summer of 2009. For earlier files, set i lower]
-FER
PS: In case I haven't made this clear, the entirety of the NavList archive, the message board functions, the posting capability, the joining and member options tools, message fetching and parsing, the image index, etc. ... the whole thing... is software that I wrote myself with two exceptions: the file upload tool which is brettle web's "NeatUpload", and the distribution "back-end" for individual messages (not digests, summaries, or short messages) which is handled, for the time being, by freelists.org. What this means, of course, is that very nearly anything can be changed if it's physically and technically possible to change it. It's mostly a question of me finding the time to make the changes.
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