Sunday, December 18, 2005

Read the news whenever you want, without Internet connection (and III)

In previous posts had treated the subject of RSS feeds and mobile version pages, which are both very good sources of information suited to be transferred to our PDA for offline reading. Following an analysis of different alternatives I have recommended Sunrise, a free software project based on Plucker, which allowed convert web pages as both feeds into a format that ra then displayable on our Palm.

Sunrise is highly customizable. We recommend that before you start introducing sources buestra list to take a while to the configuration of the defaults in the "Tools-> Default Properties ...." These options will be applied to default later that each source added. I'm going to the commentators seem to me most important:

  • "Link depth" refers to the depth with which Sunrise surfing the web in question. A value of "0" means only save page itself, "1" you indicate that you save the page and links, etc.. For an RSS feed normally use "0", but for a news website, for example, higher values will be needed to download the various news to those links on the cover.
  • For greater intelligence, we can define filters in the follow links to download parts of a site that we are interested, but not with others that do not form part of the text-only version, or linking to an external page, etc.. This can be configured in the "Filters".
  • In the event that our sources have images, these are the ones that will occupy almost the entire space, so it is essential to control the quality with which they are stored, to avoid problems with memory available when viewing. Sunrise automatically resize graphics, and for not wasting space in our memory device. According to our Palm has a standard screen resolution (160x160 pixels) or high (320x320 pixels), define the size to which the images will be saved. We can also play with the depth of color: 16-bit color is true, while 8-bit offers an acceptable outcome, saving much storage space. To Palms in black and white, there is a possibility to save grayscale or even monochrome. For íltimo, Sunrise if we can save a version of the real size images, we can see after clicking the small version of them.
  • Lastly, "Output" define whether the documents will be stored in RAM or SD card (recommended latter), and "Schedule" choose whether the documents will be updated periodically (for which we must take Sunrise running, although minimizes comfortably in the system tray), or only during a Hotsync.

Finally, now that you know how to use Sunrise, I will commentator a trick that allows use Bloglines, and the version for mobile devices, as an intermediary. That's because the files RSS pages, typically have a length at random posts, which in some cases documents can be really big. The solution is to open an account at Bloglines, where our syndicated RSS feeds, and then use Sunrise to download page for mobile devices from Bloglines. To achieve this, firstly, make it easier administration of the RSS, since our list will be safe resettlement and formatting in your web server, and we can access our news from any computer with Internet connection, and besides, Bloglines in default only shows the news emerged after our last visit, so that we will not have to navigate through old news, while saving space in our PDA.

For this integration must take the following steps:

  1. Add a source of information, visit:
     http://www.bloglines.com/mobile?Lang=spanish 
    We will use a "link depth" from "3"
  2. Within the properties of the source, go to the tab "Advanced" and "Script" choose "Embedded", and press the button "Edit script ...." In the window that opens enter the following code, which filters the links to follow to download only what belongs to our news:

      document.onanchorlink = function (link) ( 
        if (link.depth == 1) ( 
          var regexp = new RegExp ( ".* subs"); 
          link.exclude =! link.uri.match (regexp); 
        ) 
        if (link.depth == 2) ( 
          var regexp = new RegExp ( "sub ="); 
          link.exclude =! link.uri.match (regexp); 
        ) 
        if (link.depth == 3) ( 
          var regexp = new RegExp ( "bloglines | google | given"); 
          link.exclude = link.uri.match (regexp); 
        ) 
      ); 
    

  3. Finally, we owe it to indicate where Sunrise is our archive of cookies to be LOGE correctly in Bloglines and enters into our personal account. To do so, in the "Tools-> Preferences" tab enter the "Network" and where we are asked "Mozilla / Netscape cookies.txt files" introduce the route of this file, which corresponds to our account on the computer, example

      C: \ Documents and Settings \ Marcos \ Application Data \ -> 
      \ Mozilla \ Firefox \ Profiles \ dktph277.default \ cookies.txt 
    

And now, now every time you synchronize this source, we will have a copy of our Bloglines on the PDA, ready to read offline and with all its images. ? Ste is the method that I use every day, and get a result very good. Should only be careful not to miss many days without sync, as the file size will be getting fat as they add posts without reading. Actually I have given a further twist, to save each source RSS bloglines in a separate file, but today has already been enough explanation. I hope you enjoy this method, and if you have any questions, I would gladly help in what it can through the comments.

Note: credit latter method is Naaijkens Klaas, who originally published it in LifeHacker Community.


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