The LOST (GNU/Linux-One-Stanza Tips) emerged from a fact that we
read somewhere ... The readership or information propagation of e-mail
attachments is about 80% whereas all other modalities inclusive of banner
ads and redirection to URLs account for only about 20% readership.
Most members of the LOST team has have been on various GNU/Linux related
lists for quite a long time ... The same pattern emerges on all lists ...
as newbies come on to the list, the same queries are floated time and
time again ...
The LOST project was born in the Linux-India-Help mailing list. In Aug 2001,
A few of the LIH members got together, and formulated the format of such tips,
maintain a random indexing system, and developed methods of integrating the
snippets with various mailers using existing software or developing programs
de-novo to meet those ends.
The main purpose of this group was to get together and write a series of
documents to common queries on GNU/Linux, which would be put up at some site,
and LOST was only one facet of the activities.
A few of the common queries are being clubbed together in the form of LOST
(GNU/Linux-One-Stanza-Tips) document ... These are intended to be used as random
signatures to outgoing mails to GNU/Linux related lists. They are relatively short
(less than 6 lines of width=62 chars).
Anybody is free to contribute to these LOST documents ... It is requested that
any contributions to the LOST document may kindly be sent to the LOST project for
registering, so that there are no conflicts with the serial numbers and formatting.
The same will be added to the tarball and put up at this site during the next update,
which is done when every 50 LOST snippets accumulate ...
If people lend a helping hand in using these LOST document as their signatures to
GNU/Linux related list postings, and add to the list of documents themselves, we are sure,
the learning period for GNU/Linux newbies would reduce ... and folk trying to get a
foot-hold in the "daunting" world of GNU/Linux would pick up the tricks of the trade
fast ...
There are a set of scripts written various contributors to incorporate LOST snippets
as random or specific sigs automatically into your mailer and various other functions
to manipulate this collection. The scripts have been linked seperately for download.
