MarkMail: now archiving xml-dev

[Jason Hunter <jhunter@acm.org>]

For the last few months I've been working on a new project: a web site 
for interacting with email archives.  It makes heavy use of XML.  Each 
email is stored internally as an XML document and accessed using XQuery. 
  All searches, faceted navigation, analytic calculations, and HTML page 
renderings are performed on a single MarkLogic Server machine.

We launched the site about three weeks ago, hosting all the public 
emails from the Apache Software Foundation.  That's about 500 lists and 
4,000,000 messages.  We've now started adding other lists of interest. 
Last week I loaded xml-dev:

http://xml-dev.markmail.org

As you'll see with the chart on the home page, one of our goals with the 
site has been to focus heavily on analytics.  We have lots of graphs and 
counts.  Every query you write gets its own histogram chart.

http://xml-dev.markmail.org/search/from:"michael+kay"+type:announcements

Another goal has been interactivity.  Every search result screen gives 
you lots of ways to refine your search (by sender, list, attachment 
type, etc).  Plus we did a lot with keyboard shortcuts.  You can hit "n" 
and "p" to move to the next and previous result and "j" and "k" to move 
up and down the thread view.  There's a lot of little things like this. 
Plus if your result message includes Office or PDF files they're in-line 
interactive too.

http://xml-dev.markmail.org/search/ext:ppt+xml

The subdomain you use implicitly limits the messages you search.  Thus 
http://xml-dev.markmail.org searches only lists with "xml-dev" in their 
name (a single list).

You can search all Apache lists at http://apache.markmail.org, all 
Apache Axis lists at http://axis.markmail.org, or across all lists at 
http://markmail.org.  You can always limit your search view using 
"list:axis" in your query, but using the domain handles that a bit more 
elegantly.

I hope you all find this useful!

Notes on using the site:

* Search using keywords as well as from:, subject:, extension:, and 
list: constraints

* The GUI doesn't yet expose it, but you can negate any search item, 
like -subject:soap

* You can sort results by date by adding order:date-forward or 
order:date-backward to your query

* Remember to use "n" and "p" keyboard shortcuts to navigate the search 
results

* You're going to want JavaScript enabled

-jh-