Friday, December 16, 2005
Read the news when they want, without Internet connection (II)
In the first post on this subject commented that exist on the Internet, both pages on the Internet with simple, text and image, optimized to be viewed on PDAs and smartphones, such as RSS feeds with the latest news ready to be read on our PDA, but that in principle had not found any program, the usual for these duties, which pleases me when it comes to transfer them to my Palm to read them so offline.
Well, actually does exist a method, which besides being very powerful, comfortable and fully automatic, all of the steps used to free software tools. Is based on Plucker, so to begin with, I will make clear what each of the parties that make up this program:
- Plucker itself, is an open document format, which can store e-books, páginas HTML, plain text documents, etc.. Supports hypertext links and images, among many other things, and is free viewer for Palm (Plucker Viewer), as for some time for PocketPC (Vademecum).
- On the other hand is Distiller Plucker, a series of scripts that are in charge of turning a page in HTML format Plucker.
- Finally, we Plucker Desktop, a graphical interface for Windows that allows us to do much more user-friendly Distiller.
Plucker Viewer
With Plucker can directly converitr web sites formatted for PDAs, or ebooks previously converted to HTML, Plucker format, and then synchronize on the PDA, so there will have to read them when we want. There option to read from the SD card, thus not wasting precious internal space of our machine, and the results are excellent.
But even he can give a round of measures over the process, as for example we can not read our RSS feeds. And it was created for Sunrise.
Sunrise Desktop WindowsXP
Sunrise is another free software project, programmed in Java and cross-platform (Windows and Linux). It is based on Plucker, but the ability to download RSS feeds of our favorite blogs, and then convert it to HTML format, with the index and all, then use Plucker to convert it into a document that we can read from the PDA. The result is that any page that has an RSS feed, can be read from our PDA without problems, without need for internet connection, since Sunrise is responsible for the Hotsync, or regular intervals (hourly, daily, weekly, etc) to download the RSS feed, check whether it has changed, if so, and then transform it into HTML to Plucker, and finally copy it to the PDA. And best of all is that the entire process is automatic and it does not take more than a minute or two (depending on how many RSS feeds you want to download). Allows importing OPML, which means we can directly import our collection of RSS feeds from aggregator that solamos use, without having to write them one by one.
Well, I think that by now I have given quite a few things that think and move. I invite you to juguéis a bit with Sunrise, and in the near post and'll end explaining the possibilities for customization of Sunrise (some of which already had Plucker) and a way to integrate with your account at Sunrise Bloglines, just to read the posts which have appeared since the last Hotsync. You are not impatient.
Posts in this series:
- Read the news when they want, without Internet connection (I)
- Read the news when they want, without Internet connection (II)
- Read the news when they want, without Internet connection (and III)
By: Mark Gonzalez Troyes in Palm Tricks
RSS comments | 
Print this post
Related Articles
Subscribe to stay abreast of developments in this blog
Greetings:
Congratulations on the page. I'm Chilean and unfortunately the PDA versions of newspapers Chileans are null, only for cell phones, besides being a paid service. I came here to try to Sunrise. What utilcé with the only newspaper that is organizing in Chile "La Tercera", but does not own PDA version. After much testing, I could finally take the newspaper in sync with my Palm TX. Unfortunately I have a problem: I can not take away certain parts of the page that are not news, I mean links. I used the function "Filters", but can not get roles. Is a problem that is more "aesthetic", but maybe someone can help. Finally. How can I keep diaries for dates, so that the synchronization does not miss news that I have not read it?
In advance thank you very much.
Javier
Hey Javier, thanks for your feedback.
Regarding the filtering of certain links that do not interest you, I can only recommend that you read the third part of this article, which show an example of the filter you use daily to read news from Bloglines. This lets you define what links to follow or not, even using a filter other than as the depth at which you (one for the home page, a page for each news item, etc).
Regarding the dates, I fear that Sunrise always overwrites every time you update a file. The only option is to hand-copy the file to another location to preserve it. The files generated by Sunrise are saved in the folder:
C: \ ... \ Palm \ username \ sunrise \
To retrieve past news, I recommend you use an aggregator such as Bloglines. So you can ask him to show you the news appeared on the last day / week / month / etc in your feeds.
I hope I given any useful idea. A greeting.
AL PDAExpertos and synchronize the PDA TRungsteno by Plucker accents and eñes are as strange letters on my Palm ... that should be and how can I fix it?
Oops, should not happen. Sometimes it happens because of a flaw bloglines of, but the next day should appear good. If you tell me not to fix and investigate further. The official feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/pdatungsteno
We need to put any special configuration in Plucker to create the profile of synch ... maybe I'm wrong and I'm not selecting the language properly, a mistake in the coding of characters ...
Do not worry about choosing language, I work all feeds perfectly leaving "unspecified" in each, using Sunrise XP. In Sunrise normal, I also Input Encoding to "autodetect" and Outpt Encoding a windows-1252.
Bloglines sometimes old school news and all the characters wrong, but as soon as the marks and you forget to read them.
It was a problem of coding of characters ... everything is settled with Sunrise XP. Thank you
Your welcome. Enjoy
mmm ... cleared to be true, but could you tell me how? It happens to me exactly the same.
Eye, I'm not using sunrise (that is my next step), I am simply creating a channel with Plucker desktop to the mobile version:
http://www.pdatungsteno.com/wp-mobile.php
You might not be able to install any application of Plucker in the sd card? 3 files because install one that is. prc that should be the other is a viewer. pdb of user guide and another is a library. If you install it in the memory of my palm amiss but if I install the card I do not go, or do I have to install the application of Plucker in the internal memory of the palm and then set me to download and read websites from the card? thanks.