Subject: update on AstroWeb at MSSSO

From: [email-masked] (anton koekemoer)
Date: Tue, 31 May 94 22:36:55 EST

Dear friends,

You may have noticed that my version of AstroWeb at MSSSO has been undergoing
something of a facelift over the last month or so. This is now essentially
finished. The top-level file is still under the same URL:
	http://meteor.anu.edu.au/anton/astronomy.html

The main change is that I now regularly update local copies of the other
AstroWeb presentations. These are fetched once a day using scripts derived
from those used by Daniel Egret / Bob Jackson. The files are automatically
fetched and compared to previous versions and any differences are kept in a
separate directory, making it much easier to check for new URLs. I still add
URLs to the final database by hand but that's just my personal preference. I
also fetch and compare two files not in the official AstroWeb presentations:
	http://fits.cv.nrao.edu/www/astroweb/inp_incoming.html
	http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/whats-new.html
Bob, if you like I'll also include your "editable" master file in the list of
files to be fetched and checked. Currently I don't know its URL. In case anyone
is interested in the scripts I'm using, everything is kept in the directory:
	http://meteor.anu.edu.au/anton/astroweb/fetch/
The README file gives a reasonable, if somewhat terse, description of the
functions of the different scripts and how they relate to each other. Feel free
to copy/modify these scripts (improve them even -there's a lot of scope for
that), or just check them to see that I'm fetching the right files. (PS I note
that the text of the README file appears automatically, along with the files,
when the above URL is selected - it's kind of useful but I have no idea of
whether this is a real or bogus "feature" of Mosaic...)

One question I'd be interested in: - is (was) it the intention of Astroweb to
incorporate the CDS yellow-page URLs into the database? I have taken the
liberty of converting all the "personal" homepage URLs from CDS (url2.htm) into
the standard format, and these have been merged with the other records (some
minor changes being made to the other records in the case of alternate URLs) to
produce the final file:
	http://meteor.anu.edu.au/anton/astroweb/yp_topzone.html
- However if there is some political problem with doing this then I'll happily
remove all these URLs again. For the record there are now 883 URLs in this new
yp_topzone.html. Please feel free to fetch it. Some other minor changes have
also been made, primarily to the titles of university departments, in order to
increase the general consistency of URL names. But there's still a lot of room
for improvement in this area.

It's incredible just how quickly the Web grows and how fast one has to move
in order to keep up with it, even just the astronomy-related services -or is it
just me? Seems that a good way is to do a little each day, basically along the
same lines as a hobby. This also seems to match the growth pattern of www
itself.

						cheers,
						 - anton.