Finding out how to reply to a mailing list message

This morning I had received a reply about why my xhtml file wasn't being gzipped by Nginx. The reason my test file wasn't being gzipped is because it's content length was too short - the default gzip_min_length is 20, whereas my test page had a content-length of 11.

So I tried making my test page larger to see if this would fix it, but it still wasn't being gzipped. I wanted to reply to the message to say this, but I had subscribed to the digest email, and I couldn't see a way to reply to an individual message. I couldn't just send a new message to the list as this would appear as a new thread. And I couldn't just use the same subject line as my original post, but start it with Re:, as

1. I wasn't sure if this would work in making the message appear as a reply to my original message
2. Even if it did appear as a reply to my original message, it would appear as that, rather than a reply to the reply to my original message, which is what I wanted it to appear as

So I spent most of the morning trying to work out how to reply to a mailing list message. Unfortunately, most of the pages that Google brought up were mailing list messages, rather than tutorials on how to use a mailing list. And the mailing list tutorials that I could find didn't seem to have anything about how to actually reply to messages.

Eventually I came across something saying about 'In-Reply-To'. Doing some more googling I came across this article: Threading: Message-ID, References, In-Reply-To. Doing some googling to see if mailman mailing lists work the same way, I found this message: [Mailman-Users] Thread not shown allthough In-Reply-To present, which seems to indicate that mailman does use the same headers to work out message threading.

The next problem I had was how to use these headers from Thunderbird. After not having much success searching for 'Thunderbird "In-Reply-To", I tried searching for something like 'Thunderbird custom headers' instead, and eventually came to this page: Thunderbird Custom headers, which explains how to add custom headers to Thunderbird.

So first I had to find my Thunderbird profile folder:

On Windows Vista/XP/2000, the path is usually
%AppData%\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\,
where xxxxxxxx is a random string of 8 characters. Just browse to
C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\

on Windows XP/2000 or C:\users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\
on Windows Vista, and the rest should be obvious.

Then create a user.js file in there, which just contained the line

user_pref("mail.compose.other.header", "In-Reply-To,References");

Then restart Thunderbird for the changes to take effect. Now I could use the 'In-Reply-To' and 'References' headers. I didn't bother with the 'Message-ID' header, as I presume this is something that gets added automatically somewhere along the line. The digest email that I got sent from the mailing list contained the Message-ID of my original message and the reply to my original message, so I just copied and pasted them into the 'In-Reply-To' and 'References' fields when composing the message in Thunderbird, following the syntax from the Threading: Message-ID, References, In-Reply-To article.

After lunch I played Super Mario Bros Wii with Moccle and L, wtached an episode of Uylesees with L, then I wrote this blog post.

I had an email from Matt Garrett about SiteProfitBot, a program that will automatically build a website from you and keep it up to date with targeted content, plus put ads etc. on there to generate an income 'on autopilot' for you. Sounds too good to be true, but if you watch the video, it shows how easy it is.

So I decided to have a look at the site Matt created in the video, mybios.com, and it seems that the automated site generator is too good to be true. The articles on the front page are:

• Men's Olympic Super G skiing bios - Canada.com
• New Bios attack renders anti-virus useless | Malware Help. Org
• The Exclaiming Gamer Podcast 7-14-09
• Market Wire - EastBridge Investment Group Sends a Funding Group to China to Visit Key Clients

So, only one of those articles is actually to do with a computer Bios, one is to do with biographies, one mentions the Bioshock computer game, and I don't know what the last article has to do with Bios.

Out of all the pages on the site

• Bios Home
• News
• Live from the Blogosphere
• In Forums
• Hot off the Press
• Podcasts
• Videos
• Best Sellers

Most of the pages are either blank or containing content nothing to do with computer Bios, and some content seems to be nothing to do with any definition of bios at all. However, the 'Live from the Blogosphere' page seemed to have content that was to do with computer Bios, so it seems the content scraper they're using for the blogs works okay.

Now, having said all that, it does produce a nice looking website, and fill it full of content and ads, and will update it's content automatically (obviously I couldn't check this, but see no reason why it wouldn't). I think also that if you were using a less ambiguous keyword than 'Bios', you would probably get targeted articles that did match your keyword. The blog used a creative commons licsensed design from styleshout.com - Jungleland.

I just clicked through to see the cost of Site Profit Bot ($67), and I think it must have the longest squeeze page ever. Personally, I don't really see the point of Squeeze pages, they're always so long I don't bother reading them at all.

I did a bit of work trying to get my url shortener website online, and then started checking the error logs for my various sites. I found I had a few errors:

• 404s for robots.txt
• Somebody requesting filenames with spaces in, but without the spaces e.g. for "my file.jpg" they were requesting "myfile.jpg", and so causing a 404
• Uninitialized variable - to do with my nginx config, I was setting a variable in an if block, then checking its value later, so of course if the first if block wasn't executed, then when it came to check the value of the variable, the variable didn't exist. This was easy to fix by just setting the variable to an empty string before the first if block.

After dinner I watched an episode of 'The Equalizer'. I looked into how to get images indexed (and ranked well) in Google Image search, went on Animal and listened to KK, had some supper, did a backup, then went to bed.

Food
Breakfast: Lemon marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Mature cheddar cheese with lettuce sanwich made with fresh bread-maker-made bread; crust of fresh bread-maker-made bread with honey; big home-made choc chip cookie; cup o' tea.
Dinner: 2x sausages; mashed potato; baked beans; ground black pepper. Pudding was tinned strawberries, strawberry whip, chocolate custard, trifle sponge, and a bit of Cadbury's flake crumbled on top. Coffee, 2x pieces of Sainsbury's caramel chocolate.
Supper: Hot blackcurrant high juice; Dark chocolate digestive; shortbread finger.