Revival of old Classic Rendezvous Mailing List Archives
 

Several years ago I acquired most of the archives of the old bikelist.org-hosted Classic Rendezvous mailing list from Alex Wetmore and quickly tossed up a static version of the archives at smontanaro.net, mostly so they could be archived by web crawlers and made available to anoraks such as us. Fast forward several years (a couple years past retirement), with the snow piling up outside, and little riding in the offing, I decided to take another crack at the site, with the aim of perhaps making it more useful. There were several problems with the original site:

• It was statically generated from ancient email-to-HTML software (MHonArc) and knew nothing about mobile devices
• With 180k messages plenty were no longer of immediate interest (outings of eBay listings, bikes & parts for sale or wanted, discussions of the demise of Wool Jersey, ...)
• There was little or no structure beyond being organized by date or thread
• Many web links were broken

The result is up here:

https://www.smontanaro.net/CR/

Some of the features:

• When you find an interesting message, you can tag it with a comma-separated list of topic names. I will review the submissions periodically and update the database behind the site.
• You can browse the current set of topics now (thought it's still pretty minimal): https://www.smontanaro.net/CR/topics
• On date index pages (like https://www.smontanaro.net/CR/2005/08/dates) you can use the form in the upper right hand corner to keep or toss messages not of interest (well, based on their subject). For example, if you want to get rid of eBay listings, select "Toss" from the dropdown menu, enter "eBay" in the search field, then click "Filter." If all you want to see are messages from Brian Baylis, select "Keep", enter "brianbaylis@juno.com", then click "Filter".
• There's no submission form for this, but if you see a broken web link in a message for which you can find a replacement, let me know. Sometimes that will just be a referral to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. At other times you might find a suitable real replacement. This can be particularly useful for defunct wooljersey.com links whose owners might have posted the content on Imgur, Flickr or Google Photos, but also for changes to peoples' or companies' web presence. (Should you wish to do some sleuthing, I can provide you with a CSV file containing a large number of defunct wooljersey.com links.)
• You should find it more-or-less usable on your phone, though that is still kinda TBD. It's clearly better than it used to be.
• End of message fluff like StripMime reports (the bikelist.org version stripped out embedded images) and Yahoo!, Juno, and AOL ads are mostly gone.

This is very much still a work-in-progress, but I hope what's there now is of use. Known warts:

• The current message threading isn't as good as MHonArc's implementation
• I think subtopics will be needed at some point
• I still have problems formatting e-sigs and other end matter
• I haven't yet bothered to identify and eliminate some of the lesser ad sources (though have notes about several)

I'm probably going to take a bit of time off from adding functional changes to let the dust settle. In the background, I'm going to try and better wrap my brain around the technology I've chosen to implement the site.

I welcome questions, suggestions for further improvements, and reports of problems.

I released a new version today. The biggest changes are "sticky" filters on the date index pages and the use of Bootstrap for a somewhat nicer user interface. There is also a help page.

Excellent job, and many thanks! I have found Google searches containing "site:www.smontanaro.net/" alongside the wanted keywords work well.

That's precisely what the search form does, though you get to select your search engine. ;)

I tweaked the cheapo filter capability so it operates at the level of the overall index. If you apply a filter using the form in the left-hand sidebar, say, "Bottechia", it will only display those months in which a message subject mentioned that brand (or someone with "Bottechia" in their email address posted). That filter will continue to be applied until cleared, so if you poke the "dates" or "threads" link it will apply. Furthermore, if you poke the left or right arrow links on such pages, it should take you to the previous or next month with messages matching that filter.

This still needs a bit of work. I'm happy to field questions or reports about problems with this feature.