Aminet status update December 2006

[nicomen]

It's that time of the year again, some celebrate Festivus or Kwanza, some get to build snowmen and others throw shrimps on the barbie and surf at the beach. The Aminet team however, spend the season working for you, always trying to improve Aminet. This is what has happened since last time:

- We've got yet another mirror, the first US one after the new world Aminet actually. us2.aminet.net. For now it's a HTTP only mirror.

- You can now search Aminet packages by their content. Yes, that means you finally have a way to find out which package a file on your harddrive originated from. Excellent way for developers to get hold of specific header files or source code files too.

- Search results show download numbers per package, that means you can now list your favourite categories, platforms, authors and similar and order them by popularity. This complements the already implemented download stats that we announced last time.

- Search in readme (and content) has been speed up and should take from 0-5 secs, rather than 20-60 secs as before.

- Simple search should also now behave more like the classical Aminet search, when receiving search terms it tries matching it to package name, path or description.

- We've added links to our public IRC channel irc://irc.amigaworld.net/aminet and to the mailing list interface at the services page.

- And last, but not least, a new web upload interface has been carved out. We've tried to make one that is easier to use based on feedback and focused on it being intuitive. You can choose wether you want to upload a readme file separately or create it with an easy-to-use form. Thanks to everybody testing it, and don't hesitate in giving us your comments about it.

In addition there is of course quite a few bug fixes and small improvements, if you want to know more, check out the Changelog.

As a last note, it's worth noticing that in 2006, we have surpassed the amount of uploads from 2005, 2004, 2003 and even 1992, which was the year Aminet started.

Currently there is only about 130 files missing from reaching another milestone, namely the 2002 number. The question is though wether that is possible during the last two weeks of the year...

Yours,
The Aminet team
Aminet

[McVenco]

As always: thanks a LOT for what you guys are doing. As long as Aminet still exists, the Amiga is still alive (just my opinion, but I guess it's quite true...)

[InTheSand]

Definitely! Kudos to the Aminet team... It's a fantastic resource.

 - Ali

[Matt_H]

Cheers for your continued work, but I would like to complain about the basic, default search feature. It looks like it now uses an OR operator between words, which means getting more descriptive about the package you're looking for generates MORE results to sift through, instead of narrowing it down. Any chance we could see the old algorithm, at least as an option?

[nicomen]

Good points, I'll see if we can make something that makes everyone happier but that still isn't narrowing down things too much for inexperienced users.

[ChaosLord]

Ok I tested the searching just now...
and yes the searching is broken bigtime  :boohoo:

Luckily it should be dead ez to fix
just change an OR to an AND in the source code somewhere and *presto* all will be working again.

[AmigaPete]

You guys have done and continue to do a great job and valuable service for all Amiga users. I think a lot of us here would not be here if it wasn't for Aminet. I still remember first connecting to Aminet using AmiFTP - like opening up a treasure chest. Also getting my first Aminet CDs from SafeHarbor.

Pete

[nicomen]

The search is similar to before, except it now restricts itself to a path if a path is found among the search terms.

This is 99,9% how the old world Aminet search worked.

Could you please give me an example on how you think it's broken, preferably with the hits (url) found and what you expcet to be found, or not found?

[ChaosLord]

I was going to provide you a URL with the broken hits... but... Aminet is broken again...
Why is it that every time you update Aminet, the whole site disappears from the WWW?

Anyway just type in
Total Chaos AGA
into the search box
then you will get 4.2 gazillion hits
instead of just the few hits that are relevant.

The Aminet search was working correctly until sometime recently... maybe a couple of weeks ago?  I don't remember.. but I was searching for a gif library and it was really impossible since the searcher kept returning ALL libraries and ALL gifs instead of just gif libraries.  It was wack! :crazy:

[nicomen]

ok, will look at this.

[Matt_H]

Aminet DNS seems to be down at the moment; I'll test it when it comes back online.

[AmigaMance]

I'm with Matt_H and ChaosLord on this. when i searched for digital almanac some days ago, i got results concerning digital almanac. Now, i get too many irrelevant items.
 Please, bring the previous search method back. I don't think it matters if this one is close to the "old aminet" one. It works bad.

[Matt_H]

I was searching for the ARexx script to invoke a browser to view HTML emails from YAM. Search terms: "yam html"

Resulted in 922 packages, including this one which is completely irrelevant. I'm sure there are more as well.

I'd like to recommend that the old search be reimplemented as the default (people are used to it, after all), and any improvements be made to the new advanced search instead.

[AmigaMance]

Oh-oh... I just discovered that there are tons of broken links. Main files and readmes.

[nicomen]

@amigamance:

urls please, so we can check and fix, thanks