Guest kmara Posted March 20, 2003 Report Posted March 20, 2003 One thing I have missed from my iPAQ is AvantGo, and with the impending end of the GPRS bundle I have been investigating methods of storing web content locally on my SPV. I have used HTTrack - http://www.httrack.com/ an open source offline browser/website download software to take snapshots of a number of PDA/SPV friendly websites pages. It deals with the hard work of making pages relative to one another. I am sure other offline browsers would work equally well but HTTrack was the first I tried and is free! The specific sites that are of interest to me are - The Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/avantgo/ Wired News - http://www.wired.com/news_drop/palmpilot/ Slashdot - http://slashdot.org/palm/ Each of the above sites are designed to viewed on PDAs, so are perfect for the SPV. The software is very flexible and I have only just skimmed the surface of its capabilities, you can define the level of information captured, specific directories, exclusions etc. You can create "projects" within HTTrack, a project details the sites that you are going to mirror, and the specific options. Once you have configured a project, it downloads the html pages, images etc, and stores them locally on your PC, creating sub-folders and changing all the links to be relative. This can then be copied to your SPV, it creates a html index page, that provides a link to each of the web sites you have downloaded. I have created a favorite on my SPV called "Offline Web" that points at this index file. This is great and very useful, however I am also looking at creating my own tailored pages/content, by using my website and PHP to capture content (via page scraping, parsing HTML, RSS feeds etc.) that I am interested in from other pages and formatting it to suit the SPV and then saving it offline via HTTrack to my SPV. I am also thinking of automating it (probably using Winbatch) so that it downloads the data from The Guardian/other web sites early every morning and copies it to an SD card prior to me going to work. This will enable me to read a virtual paper on my SPV on the train! One thing to note about HTTrack is that it creates a cache of the pages that it downloads, there is no need to copy this to the SPV as it is not used and takes up quite a bit of space. It is by default located at: C:My Web Sites[project name]hts-cache
Guest Syvwlch Posted March 20, 2003 Report Posted March 20, 2003 Neat idea! Gotta try that right away... :)
Guest madness7 Posted April 5, 2003 Report Posted April 5, 2003 :lol: Tried this a couple of days ago and it works very well. You can schedule HTTTrack to download whenever you want. Saves a fortune on gprs transfer. Would be really great to have a way of automating the copy if these files to the spv. Let me know if you manage to get it working. Cheers
Guest jenneth Posted April 13, 2003 Report Posted April 13, 2003 I've heard rumours of an AvantGo client for SmartPhone in the works. Can anyone verify?
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