Two years ago, I was writing regularly for a small comms magazine which
is aimed at BBS and net users. I had been writing articles on Usenet
and MUDs but there seemed little interest because people didn't really
know what the Internet was. Then media interest in the net had started
to pick up, and I suspected that people would want to know how to get
onto it and so decided that I'd do one of those comparison table reports
on Internet Access Providers in the UK.
A friend just happened to mail me the UK IAP FAQ and I was kicking myself
that I hadn't heard of it before. The list I'd been sent was quite old
and so I mailed the maintainer and asked if he had a more recent one. He
said he hadn't and that he would have trouble maintaining the information
because he was about to leave his account (the list probably had 10
providers then) so I calmly offered to take it over. The idea was that
I would be at the source of the information and so I'd be able to write
an up-to-date comparison article.
Sunil's list consisted of 100+ line free-form entries from providers and
people tended to supply all kinds of different information. I already knew
of Peter Kaminski's PDIAL and the nixpub lists and so adapted Kaminski's
format to the UK, added a few more fields, and started a summary list,
which is the one posted to news.answers. I never did the article; media
interest started to snowball from the end of 1993, journalists started
asking for the list and it started popping up all over the place.
There are now at least 70 IAPs in the UK. I still maintain the free-form
list but am now regularly flamed by at least one person whenever it's
posted to uk.telecom (it's ~150K in 3 parts) even though we took a vote
last month to decide whether I should continue posting there. Flaming has
become fashionable, I realised. I started a UK Internet consultancy &
trainers list a few months ago, as it struck me that there were people and
businesses who could or wanted to get a *connection* but didn't know what
to do with it.
Over time, I developed my own software to manage the information (I'm a
database programmer) so I have a system which holds all the entry
versions, can produce lists for ftping (straight file), posting
and for the mailing list (split into <64K chunks) and crude HTML. It
also generates the monthly update reminder mail to all the providers
and is a crude mass-mailing system to the providers and my mailing
list people.
The current format is woefully inadequate and a new database design was
completed a few months ago but I haven't done anything with it. If any
of the other IAP FAQ maintainers have read this far and are interested
in combining effort to develop a generic spanking database to generate
IAP lists, please contact me.
How much time do y'all spend on your FAQ(s)? I spend two days a month
which I don't know is a lot or little: to update the database with
mail, to generate, check and send the update reminders. Then, later, to
update the database again with updates, generate the ftpable files, posts,
mailing list mail and HTML versions (which then need uploading and checking).
I then do the full-HTML provider's and consultancy web pages by hand (ahem).
Paola, grimacing at her long message
-- http://www.limitless.co.uk/~paola/ http://www.limitless.co.uk/inetuk/ - UK Internet Lists
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