[Freeciv] List archive updates

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I've been able to free up some space on my server and am working on
the archives on arch.freeciv.org (aka lists.complete.org), which
include the FreeCiv list archives.

In addition, new search engine technologies have appeared, which I
plan to deploy shortly.  (I'm specifically looking at mnogosearch,
which has backends for PostgreSQL and MySQL databases -- a definite
plus)

One change has already been made: a bunch of useless headers are no
longer shown on message pages.  This means you don't have to do as
much scrolling to read the actual message, and it should make
searching easier.

Another change is ready to go also: simply using -9 for the gzipped
HTML files.  For browsers that can handle it, archive pages are
already transparently transferred gzipped, improving download times
and reducing server load (pages for older browsers are decompressed on
the fly).  But they were not gzipped with -9.  Hopefully that will
get a little bit extra performance out of the system and reduce disk
usage a bit.

On another note, I should let you know that I am experimenting to
Google AdSense on parts of three sites.  Please see
http://changelog.complete.org/articles/2004/06/23/an-adsense-experiment/
for reasons why.  I've got text-only ads on all of
changelog.complete.org and parts of quux.org and lists.complete.org
(aka arch.freeciv.org).  I pay about $600 a year out of my own pocket
to host all this, and while I don't expect to get that much from the
ads, maybe it will be enough to buy some more disk space from the
hosting company (list archives consume about 2GB of disk space on a
6GB server).  As I said in URL above, it's an experiment and may go
away if it doesn't work well.  If anyone here has a problem with any
of this, please let me know.  If you (FreeCiv people) would be upset
about it, I'll take them back off the FreeCiv archives right away.

Thanks,

John Goerzen