Infopackets Search Engine

Recall --

A few weeks back, I announced that I would be making major changes to the infopackets web site. Since making that announcement, I have rewritten the newsletter delivery program to optimize distribution and to collect statistical information as the newsletter is delivered.

The information gathered now allows me to see which newsletter emails are being accepted, rejected, or failed during delivery. The information collected can also be used to prune the subscriber base by identifying email addresses that continually bounce.

Side note: Optimizing the newsletter delivery program is of great importance. As it stands, there are now 303,000 subscribers in the database: each time the newsletter is delivered, roughly 283,000 messages are accepted, while 8,000 messages bounce with a permanent 'generic' error message (sometimes, without a reason). When the newsletter is delivered, about 8,500 ~ 10,000 users visit the web site within the same day.

There is still much more work to do.

Tuning the mail server is just one of the many planned changes that is yet to be seen online our web site. The biggest task will be the implementation of a 'control panel' which will change the layout of the newsletter and allow users to respond to articles (and post topics of their own).

RE: Search Engine now online

I spent much of yesterday writing a web script that would customize the results of our new Search Engine. The new web script (called fdse.pl) works by calling the search engine program and then translates the results into a more user-friendly layout. You can access the search engine by clicking the "Search" button at the very top of this page, or by clicking on this link.