[amsat-bb] Holiday Gift from the AMSAT Web/News Team

[Emily Clarke <w0eec@xxxxxxxxx>]

Happy Holidays Everyone,

Tonight I was able to complete the task of porting the ANS news archive 
back to 1994 into a database.  It is now indexed, and you can search any 
news article going back to 1994.  This means all the news articles titles 
or descriptions (generally the first line of an article) may be searched 
online.  The Search page is linked from the ANS news page, and can also be 
found at:
http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/news/searchNews.php

I converted approximately 3244 news stories from approximately 500 news 
bulletins.  (10 stories didn't convert and those will be converted by hand 
next week.)  The formatting isn't 100% perfect (probably closer to 98%) but 
I'm going to add a "view original text" option so that you can see the 
original formatting once you've made a search.

This is the first of many news improvements we will be implementing in the 
coming months.  Much of this will not be visible to the membership as it 
will be improved tools to assist the editors and reviewers.  The first 
visible change is that the online news will now contain formatting and may 
include photographs.  We will also give AMSAT members the option to receive 
an email notification with a  link to the online news rather than a plain 
text version of the news.  We will also offer the news in XML format and 
other formats, in addition to the text version already available.

One feature that was requested was an RSS feed, and I've already built a 
working model of that.  However, not having RSS enabled devices I could use 
some help testing.  If you have an RSS device, or have been using RSS with 
other sites, please consider volunteering to help out!

73,

Emily


---------------------------------
W0EEC - CM87tm
AMSAT Area Coordinator - San Francisco Bay Area
http://www.projectoscar.net    http://www.PlanetEmily.com

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