Now archiving css-discuss

OK, Ryan, we can load css-discuss now.

This is what I said yesterday to Ryan Grimm, my compatriot behind MarkMail, who's been wanting to load the css-discuss list archives since we started the project.

Ryan's our front end guru, expert at JavaScript and CSS, and responsible for most of the goodness you see in our user interface. He tells me when it comes to figuring out browser display quirks there's no better resource than the css-discuss mailing list. So OK, Ryan, enjoy.

Hope it's equally helpful to everyone.

After Apache: XML

As anyone who's read the MarkMail FAQ knows, the site runs almost completely on XML. So it seemed fitting and proper that, after launching with the Apache Software Foundation mail archives, we should next load the lists from the XML community.

Here are the XML-related lists we've loaded so far:

• xml-dev (the classic XML list, where SAX was developed)
• JDOM (just in time for JDOM 1.1)
• XOM (a competitor to JDOM)
  
• xsl-list (for XSLT discussion)
  
• xquery-talk (for XQuery discussion)
• xmlschema-dev (for XML Schema discussion)
  
• MarkLogic General (for MarkLogic Server discussion)
  

ApacheCon Report

The core MarkMail development team (Ryan Grimm, John Mitchell, and myself) just returned from the ApacheCon conference in Atlanta. In between some fabulous meals, we schmoozed and spread the word about MarkMail hosting the full Apache mail archives.

We found an inventive way to get the word out. We printed a series of T-shirts, a different design for each of the most active Apache projects. The top of each shirt says "list:apache" or "list:tomcat"; something different for each project. Underneath we put the histogram chart you see on MarkMail if you perform that list-constraining search. The design looked like this:


Now, marketing people will tell you that T-shirts are an expensive give-away and something most people just throw to the back of their closet and forget about. Our theory (hope?) was that by making these shirts personal, as much about the receiver as the giver, they might be more meaningful. Happily, that's exactly what happened. People were excited to wear their project histories proudly on their chest. It sparked conversations, memories, and buzz.

Santiago Gala

We're still looking for a way to do reasonably-priced, high-quality, short-run printing. I'd love to give each person a shirt showing their own traffic histogram. "from:you"!

MarkMail is launched, break the champagne bottle!

OK, because we're just now launching there's almost no one subscribed here to read this post, but as the history will be archived I might as well note the date and our excitement. :)