As we wave goodbye and good riddance to 2020, just a note to let y'all know that we had 2,405 posts to the DCHAS-L list in 2020 - a busy year for obvious reasons. The volume was up substantially from the 1,902 posts in 2019, bringing us to a grand total of 23,297 individual posts for the years 2003 through 2020.

For those who do not know, I host the Archives on my corporate site here: http://ilpi.com/dchas/ Posts to the DCHAS list are currently being added to the Archives on Sunday evenings. The process to post these, munge the email addresses, create the next/previous links, and generate the indices uses custom code I wrote for this purpose in January of 2012.

As to why this happens on Sunday evenings, the process requires a modicum of attention so it's impractical to do in real time and I have to set aside a less busy time slot for tweaking. The issue springs from there being no standard email format (hard to believe in this day and age, is it not?) - some are plain text, some HTML, some are binary, and all of those can have different character encoding schemes (and it can be a mixture of those in messages with quoted replies), so even though I've got some really good routines to do the heavy lifting, every now and then a gremlin of some kind will pop up. In rare cases, the message pops out as gibberish or not at all. So I manually review and repair serious errors like those. Unless the volume is unusually low, I usually let minor encoding issues slide so you will occasionally see short little numeric strings or a character that doesn=E2=80™t display correctly.

I'd give you a top 10 list of posts and authors but apparently I only automated the first step of that process. I'll have to go back and do that when I find some free time. Free time. HA! Good one, Rob. Ha.

All of this reminds me to give a shout out to Ralph Stuart who for his tireless dedication to the triweekly Headlines posts. Those, too, are semi-automated but still require his (even greater) intervention in deciding how much of an article to quote (or whether to include it at all), tweaking the keywords, double checking the tags, and sending out the emails to all of us. And that's just a small part of what he does for the Division. Thanks, Ralph!

Rob Toreki

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