outerspaceways.info is the place!

When I was a teenag­er, my moth­er told me that I had weird taste in music, and I can’t say she was wrong about that. I’ve always liked music with alter­na­tive scales and tun­ings, and music with com­plex polyrhyth­mic beats. This attract­ed me from a fair­ly young age to bands and musi­cians like The Res­i­dents, Con­rad Schnit­zler, King Crim­son, Philip Glass, Tuxe­do­moon, and of course the high priest of free jazz Sun Ra.

For six­teen years an email dis­cus­sion list sole­ly for dis­cussing the music of Sun Ra and the Arkestra has exist­ed as the SATURN list. But a few months ago the admin­is­tra­tor of the mail­ing list learned that its host, surfnet.nl, would be dis­con­tin­u­ing its mail­ing lists as of 31 Decem­ber 2010. The future of the SATURN list was some­what uncer­tain, with talk of migrat­ing to a Google or Yahoo group and no clear way of pre­serv­ing the more than 25,000 archived mes­sages that make up the his­to­ry of the mail­ing list.

Once upon a time I host­ed some mod­er­ate­ly active mail­ing lists myself. On an old IBM RS/6000 that ran in my clos­et I ran a copy of Major­do­mo that han­dled the mail­ing list for a Palm users list, an RS/6000 users list, a list for type­face design­ers and more. The crude web­site con­tent man­age­ment soft­ware I wrote to han­dle the list archives for those lists evolved into the much more robust con­tent and com­merce soft­ware I devel­oped to run the Tour­Corp fam­i­ly of websites.

Even­tu­al­ly the traf­fic on most of those sites died down and I trad­ed the expense of a sta­t­ic-IP con­nec­tion for a plain vanil­la cable modem. The RS/6000 was tak­en offline (though it sits in my stu­dio today, and runs when I turn it on) and I switched to man­aged host­ing for my web­sites with Dreamhost and the list soft­ware they pro­vide, Mail­man. It was past time to upgrade to Mail­man any­way, as Major­do­mo was even then long in the tooth.

Today only a cou­ple of my lists still have any traf­fic at all, and the soft­ware I wrote for the p90.net sites sits near­ly aban­doned since I focused my ener­gy into devel­op­ment with Dru­pal instead of my pro­pri­etary sys­tem which has grown too com­plex for a sin­gle per­son to maintain. 

I’ve been mean­ing for some time to con­vert my old mail­ing list archives into Dru­pal-based foræ. I have the tools and I’ve spent a few evenings test­ing out rudi­men­ta­ry import scripts, but nev­er had a sys­tem work­ing well enough to fol­low through and make the transition.

So when it came up that the SATURN list would need a new home, it seemed nat­ur­al to vol­un­teer for the task. I knew that with a few evenings’ work I could get a sol­id forum sys­tem work­ing and that in less time than that I could have the SATURN list up and run­ning on Mail­man. What I did­n’t know is whether the tools exist­ed to prop­er­ly inter­face Mail­man to a Dru­pal-based forum front end. I vol­un­teered to host the mail­ing list with­out men­tion­ing any­thing about the web-based forum, and set to work.

Dru­pal’s core Forum mod­ule, extend­ed by Advanced Forum, serves as the back­bone of the instal­la­tion. Mail­ing list inte­gra­tion is pro­vid­ed by Mail­han­dler, Mail­save, and Listhandler. Con­fig­u­ra­tion took a lit­tle tweak­ing, but for the most part was all in the doc­u­men­ta­tion. I did­n’t want users to have to man­age mul­ti­ple logins, one for the web­site and anoth­er for the mail­ing list, and this was tak­en care of by Mail­man Man­ag­er and User Mail­man Reg­is­ter.

By the time I got all these com­po­nents togeth­er it became clear that it would be sim­pler to add a Dru­pal mod­ule that broad­casts emails based on group sub­scrip­tion and have much the same func­tion­al­i­ty as a forum act­ing as front-end for the Mail­man soft­ware. It was a lit­tle tempt­ing to go with a pure­ly web-based solu­tion, but the cul­ture of mail­ing lists is a bit dif­fer­ent than the cul­ture of Web-based foræ. Users used to their mail­ing list might want to deal with the Mail­man soft­ware exclu­sive­ly rather than use the Web forum. With oth­er foræ I might elim­i­nate the Mail­man back­end, but for the new home for the SATURN list, it is impor­tant to keep the nature of the dis­cus­sion intact by con­tin­u­ing the list as a mail­ing list.

I had orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed to use the Node­com­ment mod­ule to make com­ments acces­si­ble with their own URL and keep them iden­ti­cal to the forum top­ics from a data per­spec­tive. How­ev­er, I was unable to get Node­com­ment to work with Mail­han­dler. When test users replied to emails the replies were added as core Dru­pal com­ments rather than Node­com­ments. As that was a rel­a­tive­ly low pri­or­i­ty and I can con­vert stan­dard com­ments to Node­com­ments at some point in the future, I decid­ed to revis­it the ques­tion at anoth­er time.

I haven’t giv­en much thought to the design of the site yet, using only an off-the shelf theme from Drupal.org. I’ve installed sev­er­al themes and intend to give users the choice to change their themes for some time and col­lect feed­back about the choic­es offered. Then I’ll revis­it the ques­tion of cre­at­ing a cus­tom theme for the site. I took the ringed plan­et from my dig­i­tal paint­ing Sat­urn Is The Place (a trib­ute to Sun Ra) for use as the logo for the site but oth­er than that have made min­i­mal mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the pro­vid­ed themes. 

Migra­tion of the list archives took a bit of time. There were some emails with bina­ry attach­ments that threw off the import script, but I split the archives into import files of 2500 mes­sages each, ran the imports and han­dled the excep­tions a file at a time. I end­ed up with some dupli­cates, and some users end­ed up with mul­ti­ple pro­files cre­at­ed for the same user, but these are minor issues that can be cor­rect­ed on a case-by-case basis.

After test­ing and migra­tion were com­plete, the site, outerspaceways.info, was launched today, Christ­mas Day 2010, just six days before the old mail­ing list is set to shut down. Even with­out cus­tom design, I’m pret­ty proud of the project, which rep­re­sents about 55 hours of my time this month. Sig­nif­i­cant progress has also been made toward get­ting the old p90.net mail­ing lists moved over to the Dru­pal forum sys­tem, but those sites don’t have drop-dead dates attached to them, so I’ll prob­a­bly give them more atten­tion in the new year.

Most impor­tant­ly, I’ve got­ten to be a part of pre­serv­ing a vital, active com­mu­ni­ty ded­i­cat­ed to cel­e­brat­ing the work of a musi­cian who made great music. I still have weird taste in music, and I’ve made a place for peo­ple like me to share our enthu­si­asm for the music we love.