This week, through the efforts of our STE||AR graduate student Alireza, we have added an IRC logger to our #ste||ar and #ste||ar-dev channels. This logger will make all conversations on these channels searchable, link-able, and publicly available through a web front-end hosted at irclog.cct.lsu.edu
Using the site is simple and straight forward. After selecting the channel you wish to view, one can search for words or phrases or navigate to a specific date to find content. Additionally, you can use MySQL fulltext search operations or search for a particular user’s nick. To link to specific points in a conversation, users can select a region of the log (by clicking on the beginning timestamp, holding shift, and then selecting the ending timestamp) and then copy the URL from their browser window. Users who use the link will see the selected text sightly bolded for easier reading.
We hope that this tech will help us in documenting decisions we make and the discussions that were had to conclude them. This tool will allow us to bring a little more clarity to the murky obscurity that often surrounds software development.
We owe a special thanks to the developer of the platform, who make their work publicly available through the project’s Github site