tebee writes "One of my hobbies has benefited for 20
years or so by the existence of an online index to all magazine
articles on the subject since the 1930s. It lets you list the
articles in any particular magazine or search for an article by
keyword, title or author, refining the search if necessary by
magazine and/or date. Unfortunately the firm which hosts the
index have recently pulled it from their website, citing security
worries and incompatibilities with the rest of their e-commerce
website: the heart of the system is a 20-year-old DOS program! They
have no plans to replace it as the original data is in an unknown
format. So we are talking about putting together
a team to build a open source replacement for this – probably using
PHP and MySQL. The governing body for the hobby has agreed to host
this and we are in negotiations to try and get the original data. We
hope that by volunteers crowd-sourcing the conversion, we will be
able to do what was commercially impossible." Tebee is looking for ideas about the best way to go about this, and for leads to existing approaches; read on for more.