reid@glacier.UUCP (Brian Reid) (11/30/85)
Welcome to mod.recipes. This is a new moderated group whose purpose is to distribute a database of online formatted recipes, along with programs that search through it, create indexes, and (of course) print out nice typeset versions of the recipes. The recipes distributed through this newsgroup will form, collectively, the USENET cookbook. In addition to distributing the recipes, I will also periodically distribute the software that lets you print out your own version(s) of the cookbook. All of these recipes are formatted with a simplistic set of nroff/troff commands. It is possible, even likely, that I have done something that won't work in other variants of Unix besides the 4BSD that I am familiar with, and I invite the friendly commentary of xroff wizards from other domains of Unix who can help me get these definitions working everywhere. (Potential wizards please note: some of the clumsy syntax is there to help the cross-referencing programs find things). I've taken a tip from the way that CD players work (thank you, net.audio), and added a digital speed control to mod.recipes. All incoming submissions, after being formatted and "approved" by me (whatever that means), are placed in a queue directory, waiting for their turn to go out. There is a crontab entry that pops up every now and then and takes the first entry from the queue and sends it out. I will be very cautious about changing the speed at which entries go out--if it's too fast, people will be overwhelmed, and if it's too slow, people will charge that there isn't enough traffic and perhaps try to delete our hard-won newsgroup. After the initial burst of traffic that gets the group started, I will send out 2 recipes a week. After a while I may adjust that up or down as demand and traffic warrant. In following messages I will explain how to submit a recipe, and how to extract and use the mod.recipes software. Brian Reid Stanford
reid@glacier.UUCP (Brian Reid) (12/07/85)
[This message is being reposted because some of the major backbone sites managed to lose or mangle the previous posting of this message.] Welcome to mod.recipes. This is a new moderated group whose purpose is to distribute a database of online formatted recipes, along with programs that search through it, create indexes, and (of course) print out nice typeset versions of the recipes. The recipes distributed through this newsgroup will form, collectively, the USENET cookbook. In addition to distributing the recipes, I will also periodically distribute the software that lets you print out your own version(s) of the cookbook. All of these recipes are formatted with a simplistic set of nroff/troff commands. It is possible, even likely, that I have done something that won't work in other variants of Unix besides the 4BSD that I am familiar with, and I invite the friendly commentary of xroff wizards from other domains of Unix who can help me get these definitions working everywhere. (Potential wizards please note: some of the clumsy syntax is there to help the cross-referencing programs find things). I've taken a tip from the way that CD players work (thank you, net.audio), and added a digital speed control to mod.recipes. All incoming submissions, after being formatted and "approved" by me (whatever that means), are placed in a queue directory, waiting for their turn to go out. There is a crontab entry that pops up every now and then and takes the first entry from the queue and sends it out. I will be very cautious about changing the speed at which entries go out--if it's too fast, people will be overwhelmed, and if it's too slow, people will charge that there isn't enough traffic and perhaps try to delete our hard-won newsgroup. After the initial burst of traffic that gets the group started, I will send out 2 recipes a week. After a while I may adjust that up or down as demand and traffic warrant. In following messages I will explain how to submit a recipe, and how to extract and use the mod.recipes software. Brian Reid Stanford -- Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA