Coming Soon: Project Anzwix

Anzwix will soon be publicly accessible.

Besides finishing up code for OpenBenchmarking.org enhancements, Phoronix Test Suite 3.6-Arendal, and early planning for Phoronix Test Suite 4.0, among other business work, the next two weeks in Germany and Austria I'm also working on getting ready the public front-end to Anzwix.

Anzwix is effectively a priority mailing list filter and archive. It's internally what autonomously decides what I write about on Phoronix when it comes to news items and what allows Phoronix to be effectively run near single-handedly. And it's also what still allows for me to efficiently post news on Phoronix when at Oktoberfest or otherwise preoccupied. Going forward, there will be an Anzwix public front-end at Anzwix.com.

It doesn't simply archive all the relevant mailing lists and sort them by date or thread, but has a number of factors it uses to weight the important of any particular email. Among the factors for weighting mailing list messages is the sender of the email (based upon the associated company, how frequently that email appears on a list before, and how relevant that individual's mailing list messages were in the past), the size of any attached patch(es), the similarity of the subject and message contents to past messages on the mailing list, to what other mailing lists the message might be cross-posted to, the number of replies in the thread during select time periods, and various other factors. It also attempts to determine to relevance/subject of the email and how popular such coverage was in the past on Phoronix as polled by the PHXCMS content management system.

In other words, from pulling up a single page I can quickly see the most "popular" (or useful) messages from multiple mailing lists in one quick glance, as handled by Anzwix in real-time. (I also still commonly monitor manually my favorite mailing lists too, but usually just tapping the delete key quickly to ensure that my algorithms didn't miss anything of value.)

The mailing list message view also shows more information than what's usually shown by Mailman archives or other mailing list viewers, with showing statistics about the subject regarding the email, the poster, etc. There's also Git and BugZilla integration in the works. I'm also working on RSS/Planet and better integration going forward, to further prioritize and make more efficient my coverage in those areas.

The purpose of making a public front-end will be for exposing more interesting mailing list items that aren't otherwise important enough to be covered on Phoronix, for beginning to cover more mailing lists as well, and once polished just being a better mailing list viewer too. And yes, it will be supported by advertisements or possibly some sort of premium option.

I also am working on improving my mailing list parsing and auto-prioritization code for other Phoronix Media projects with automatic benchmarking of mailing list patches and personal Git repositories, etc -- thanks to it then tapping the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org. In the end all of the Phoronix components will hopefully tie-in elegantly.

Look for more details soon. Now that I've announced it publicly here, I'll also begin to tweet more information and talk about it at Phoronix beer meet-up events. Comments, feature requests, and other feedback are welcome, as always.