Widget

Widget exists because the Chugalug website was always stale and out of date, while the mailing list is active and dynamic. I (the list grandpappy) wanted to bring some of that energy to the web, but wanted the mailing list to be the heart of the community. The articles on the website are scrubbed of much of the noise, reply comments, footers and such, allowing them to be easily read as the important resource they often are. Unlike many list archiving systems, it does not have that frustrating "next message/comment" nesting that often makes it hard to understand a thread. Most importantly, it maintains and updates itself.

Widget is subscribed to the Chugalug mailing list, and reads the e-mails on it, creating articles automatically. It has a list of keywords and special trigger words it searches for in e-mails while adding the content to system.

For example: Mention Chugalunch or Meeting in an e-mail, and it shows up under Meetings. Talk about a job or employment, it shows up under Jobs. It also maintains a keyword list and index for common topics for this group.

Widget is crude, no installers or generic version available (yet). If you are comfortable with PHP and MySQL and would like a copy to play with, contact me at bogon@ the geeklabs domain and I'll zip up the latest and e-mail it to you. It's very small and very simple. Especially when compared to the load of Joomla/Drupal etc for a small website.