Page Registration Spec

How to register a single essay: After posting your essay to a website, create a new mail message. Address it to democracy@aol.net. The subject is 24REG. In the body of the message, paste in the URL for your essay. Send the message.

How to register a batch of essays: These instructions are for people who are managing Page Storage Servers. Create a single mail message to register all your pages. Address it to democracy@aol.net. The subject is 24LIST. The body of the message one line for each essay. Here are two examples:

mwhutch@aol.net,http://members.aol.com/mwhutch/<cr>stevecase@aol.com, http://imaginary.url.com/foo/<cr>

Each line contains two pieces of information, separated by a comma: the email address of the author and the URL of the essay. At the end of each line add a carriage return, <cr>, ascii 13. One line for each essay you're registering.

Timing: The mail server at aol.net will receive registration messages starting at Thursday 2/22/96, 12:01AM PST. All messages received after Thursday 2/22/96, 11:59PM PST will bounce.

Processing: During the 24 Hours period the mail server will process messages as described above. A CGI script running on the server produces a page of statistics about the number of messages received, number of pages registered, and some way to look at at least some of the URLs as they're coming in. Format and design of this page TBD.

You'll receive a reply: As the mail messages are processed, new mail messages are created and sent, explaining how to patch the Next, Prev and Index links. One reply is generated for each message received. If you registered a single essay, edit the HTML text of your essay, replacing the placeholder pointers with the pointers you received in the email message. Re-post it to the web. You're done! You can change the contents of this page anytime you want. Be sure to check out the WebCrawler index when it's ready.

If you registered a list, you will get one reply. Chain the messages you're storing together in a list. Set the Prev pointer of the first message to the Prev you received, set the Next pointer of the last message to the Next pointer you receive in the mail message. You're done! Keep your server on the air. Be sure you're listed on the Thanks! page.

Exact format of a reply: Here's the exact text that will appear in a reply message:

Thank you for participating in the 24 Hours of Democracy project!

Your essay has been registered.

Please copy the following text into your essay text, replacing any placeholders you already have:

[<a href="http://random.site/randomfile.html">Prev|<a href="http://important.com/importantfile.html">Next|<a href="http://www.hotwired.com/userland/24/">Index]

Upload the edited version to your website.

You're done!

Be sure to watch http://www.hotwired.com/userland/24/ for new developments.

We're planning lots of neat projects after the 24 Hour period.

Please stay involved in the process.

Democracy on the Internet is important.

Thanks from the sponsors of the 24 Hours project!

And from me...

Cooool!

Dave Winer

Please note that there are no hard carriage returns in the text they copy/paste. I've noticed that this produces spaces in Netscape, making the page look ugly, IMHO.

That about does it. Please post comments on the Mailing List. Thanks!