dmtelf has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Has anyone written a little script that takes a PerlMonk page (saved as HTML), strips out the graphics, chatterbox, etc, and just leaves the question + answers (in HTML)?

I want to put the best questions/answers in PerlMonks on my Palm so I can read & learn when on the train, toilet etc.

If no-one has, I'll give it a go but thought I'd ask first!

dmtelf

  • Comment on Reformatting PerlMonk pages for Palm organisers

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Re: Reformatting PerlMonk pages for Palm organisers
by t0mas (Priest) on Jul 21, 2000 at 14:35 UTC
    perlcgi posted his method here

    Just returned home from a few days of caravan camping with my family. My only connection to PM was through my Palm V->GSM phone (9800 bps :(.

    I've have some thougths about Palm issues, but no code yet :). I will try to do a PM "proxy" that get pages from PM and reformats them to fit Palmscape or WAP...

    Palmscape (at least my version) doesn't support cookies, so if I want to post as me, I will have to emulate these some how.
    Pages are far to large, they will have to be broken down into smaller pieces.
    It will print just the links to answers on the questions pages.
    Cut down the size on large posts to X bytes, and add a "Everything" link.

    Just some thoughts, I want it on-line, not off-line as you do :)

    /brother t0mas
      The problems with on and off line are the same. It's just whether the entire (formatted) site can be hotsync'd to the Palm before a journey begins... I'd love to have the whole Q&A section nicely formatted and always in my Palm. Where are there docs on WAP? TTFN.

      -PipTigger

      p.s. Initiate Nail Removal Immediately!
        Well, for off-line purposes I would like doc format (which is compressed), but for on-line, html will do fine.
        Maybe a Palm optimized version of PM with "Download/Mail me this in doc format" links on most pages would be the thing to go for.
        You find lots of WAP docs on www.w3.org.

        /brother t0mas
Re: Reformatting PerlMonk pages for Palm organisers
by ase (Monk) on Jul 21, 2000 at 14:45 UTC
    You may want to try the iSilo product and it's converter, iSiloWeb. I converted the The Monastery Gates page with a linkdepth of 1 and ended up with a 446k document. It has a few other options and might be better than trying to roll your own. I'm sure there are other similar tools available at the major Palm sites like Handago

    Experiment and let us fellow Palm users know what you come up with.

    -ase <it>(proud owner of a PalmIIIx)</it> Too bad it can't (as of yet) do Perl.

RE: Reformatting PerlMonk pages for Palm organizers
by Adam (Vicar) on Jul 21, 2000 at 21:42 UTC
    I use AvantGo for my palm browser, and while I've not tried to download anything as complicated as PM, it works pretty well for other things... (Like Dave Barry's weekly column.)

    BTW: I've heard rumors that Palm Perl is under development, but nothing concrete... does any one know anything about this?

      Tried Plucker? Here's some of the advantages over AvantGo:
      1. Plucker has two forms of compression (zlib/doc), AvantGo does not.
      2. Plucker supports 10 languages, AvantGo does not.
      3. Plucker supports local files (file://tmp/foo.txt) and intranet (including https://) content, AvantGo does not.
      4. Plucker supports runtime image scaling via the parser (altmaxwidth, altmaxheight), AvantGo does not.
      5. Plucker is an 85k footprint on the Palm, AvantGo 4.0 is 399k, without content.
      6. Plucker supports Gestures, Autoscroll, Tap Navigation, and Hardware button configuration options, AvantGo does not.
      7. Plucker is free and open source, under the GNU General Public License, AvantGo is not.
      8. Plucker uses an openly-documented data structure format, AvantGo does not.
      9. Plucker works on 11 platforms, 5 operating systems (with varying degrees of difficulty), AvantGo supports 1.5 OS' (Windows, and "almost" Macintosh).
      10. Plucker does not "restrict" what websites can do with their own content, AvantGo does.
      11. Plucker supports multiple instances of the same content (NYTimes with images, NYTimes with color, NYTimes without images) loaded at the same time, AvantGo does not.
      12. You can beam your Plucker content to another Plucker user, with AvantGo you cannot.
      13. Plucker offers 5 font choices, AvantGo offers two.
      I actually wrote a node on this, to help try to recruit some perl help for some parts of Plucker. Any interested monks with some spare time to lend a hand or some creative insight?
      Re: Palm Perl - I'm not sure what the status on this is, but it was mentioned earlier at PERL on a Palm?