Subject: AstroWeb announcement

From: Andre HECK <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Apr 94 15:41:38 +0200

Dear Friends,

Sorry for my silence during some time, but pressure was on a few other
things that are not quite out of the way yet. 

First of all, warmest congratulations to Don for his page -- and also
for the illustration!

A few quick words as we are preparing to announce AstroWeb to the world.
Part of this was already communicated privately to some of you, and
particularly to Don a few weeks ago.

Once Don's package will be ready, we are willing to implement here a 
`permanently' updated mirror copy as an `AstroWeb service' with all
appropriate credit. It would appear on the CDS homepage along with the
other CDS services (then the pointer should harpoon the CDS homepage
and not as currently my own list -- reachable anyway from this CDS
homepage; we would let you know when the implementation would be ready
in order to make the change). 

The advantages would be obviously to contribute to unload nrao from
essentially European users and CDS customers, as well as to use these
other CDS services as advertizing vectors (`teasers' in advertizing
slang) towards AstroWeb. The synergy would work reciprocally.

We would keep here my abbreviated and alphabetical lists for internal
purpose and also because they include now a flexible search facility.
These lists will be also continuously updated at the same time as
contributing to update the AstroWeb master file through Don's updating
forms.

All the best,
Andre.

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From: [email-masked] (anton koekemoer)
Date: Sun, 3 Apr 94 22:23:39 EST

Friends,

Bob Jackson writes:
> Does anyone have objections to:
>         Next Wednesday - April 6

no objection.

Andre Heck writes:
> and not as currently my own list...

Yes, we'd also be willing to do this at Stromlo - effectively offering a local
duplicate of Don's "astronomy.html" together with a variant of the current
mssso list - it will be derived from the same set of yp_*.html database files.
This duplication would take effect as soon as Don's happy to publicly release
the AstroWeb files to the world. If anyone's interested, a beta-version of the
new "mssso" style is under the URL

	http://meteor.anu.edu.au/anton/astroweb/yp_astro_mssso.html

- this was re-created today afresh from the new yp_topzone.html, after Don sent
his announcement. The way it looks will still be changed somewhat (for a start,
splitting it up into a few documents..). A few bugs also to be fixed. Its URL
will be changed to the current "official" mssso list (pointed to in the new
AstroWeb home page), which I'm no longer updating.

The mechanics of updating such mirror copies could probably be taken care of by
ftp daemons - new URLs could be entered into any of the astroweb "sites", and
the resultant files periodically fetched (daily? weekly?) and merged by all
sites in much the same way as Don (and myself) have been doing till now (though
the ftp'ing to date has been manual not automatic).

						cheers,
						 - anton.