sitescooper - download news from web sites and convert it automatically into one of several formats suitable for viewing on a Palm handheld.

- NAME
- SYNOPSIS
- DESCRIPTION
- OPTIONS
- INSTALLATION
- EXAMPLES
- ENVIRONMENT
- AUTHOR
- COPYRIGHT
- SCRIPT CATEGORIES
- PREREQUISITES
- COREQUISITES
- README

# NAME

sitescooper - download news from web sites and convert it automatically into one of several formats suitable for viewing on a Palm handheld.

# SYNOPSIS

sitescooper [options] [ [-site sitename] ...]

sitescooper [options] [-sites sitename ...]

sitescooper [options] [-name nm] [-levels n] [-storyurl regexp] [-set sitefileparam value] url [...]

Options: [-debug] [-refresh] [-config file] [-install dir] [-instapp app] [-dump] [-dumpprc] [-nowrite] [-nodates] [-quiet] [-admin cmd] [-nolinkrewrite] [-stdout-to file] [-keep-tmps] [-noheaders] [-nofooters] [-fromcache] [-filename template] [-prctitle template] [-parallel] [-disc] [-limit numkbytes] [-maxlinks numlinks] [-maxstories numstories] [-text | -html | -mhtml | -doc | -isilo | -misilo | -richreader | -pipe fmt command]

# DESCRIPTION

This script, in conjunction with its configuration file and its set of site files, will download news stories from several top news sites into text format and/or onto your Palm handheld (with the aid of the makedoc/MakeDocW or iSilo utilities).

Alternatively URLs can be supplied on the command line, in which case those URLs will be downloaded and converted using a reasonable set of default settings.

HTTP and local files, using the `file:///` protocol, are both supported.

Multiple types of sites are supported:

1-level sites, where the text to be converted is all present on one page (such as Slashdot, Linux Weekly News, BluesNews, NTKnow, Ars Technica);

2-level sites, where the text to be converted is linked to from a Table of Contents page (such as Wired News, BBC News, and I, Cringely);

3-level sites, where the text to be converted is linked to from a Table of Contents page, which in turned is linked to from a list of issues page (such as PalmPower).

In addition sites that post news as items on one big page, such as Slashdot, Ars Technica, and BluesNews, are supported using diff.

Note that at this moment in time, the URLs-on-the-command-line invocation format does not support 2- or 3-level sites.

The script is portable to most UNIX variants that support perl, as well as the Win32 platform (tested with ActivePerl 5.00502 build 509).

Currently the configuration is stored as a string inside the script itself, but an alternative configuration file can be specified with the -config switch.

The sites downloaded will be the ones listed in the site files you keep in your sites directory.

sitescooper maintains a cache in its temporary directory; files are kept in this cache for a week at most. Ditto for the text output directory (set with TextSaveDir in the built-in configuration).

If a password is required for the site, and the current sitescooper session is interactive, the user will be prompted for the username and password. This authentication token will be saved for later use. This way a site that requires login can be set up as a .site -- just log in once, and your password is saved for future non-interactive runs.

Note however that the encryption used to hide the password in the sitescooper configuration is pretty transparent; I recommend that rather than using your own username and password to log in to passworded sites, a dedicated, sitescooper account is used instead.

# OPTIONS

-refresh

  Refresh all links -- ignore the already_seen file, do not diff pages, and always fetch links, even if they are available in the cache.

-config file

  Read the configuration from file instead of using the built-in one.

-limit numkbytes

  Set the limit for output file size to numkbytes kilobytes, instead of the default 200K.

-maxlinks numlinks

  Stop retrieving web pages after numlinks have been traversed. This is not used to specify how ``deep'' a site should be scooped -- it is the number of links followed in total.

-maxstories numstories

  Stop retrieving web pages after numstories stories have been retrieved.

-install dir

  The directory to save PRC files to once they've been converted, in order to have them installed to your Palm handheld.

-instapp app

  The application to run to install PRC files onto your Palm, once they've been converted.

-site sitename

  Limit the run to the site named in the sitename argument. Normally all available sites will be downloaded. To limit the run to 2 or more sites, provide multiple -site arguments like so:

              -site ntk.site -site tbtf.site

-sites sitename [...]

  Limit the run to multiple sites; an easier way to specify multiple sites than using the -site argument for each file.

-name name

  When specifying a URL on the command-line, this provides the name that should be used when installing the site to the Pilot. It acts exactly the same way as the Name: field in a site file.

-levels n

  When specifying a URL on the command-line, this indicates how many levels a site has. Not needed when using .site files.

-storyurl regexp

  When specifying a URL on the command-line, this indicates the regular expression which links to stories should conform to. Not needed when using .site files.

-doc

  Convert the `page(s)` downloaded into DOC format, with all the articles listed in full, one after the other.

-text

  Convert the `page(s)` downloaded into plain text format, with all the articles listed in full, one after the other.

-html

  Convert the `page(s)` downloaded into HTML format, on one big page, with a table of contents (taken from the site if possible), followed by all the articles one after another.

-mhtml

  Convert the `page(s)` downloaded into HTML format, but retain the multiple-page format. This will create the output in a directory called site_name; in conjunction with the -dump argument, it will output the path of this directory on standard output before exiting.

-isilo

  Convert the `page(s)` downloaded into iSilo format (see http://www.isilo.com/ ), on one big page. This is the default. The `page(s)` will be displayed with a table of contents (taken from the site if possible), followed by all the articles one after another.

-misilo

  Convert the `page(s)` downloaded into iSilo format (see http://www.isilo.com/ ), with one iSilo document per site, with each story on a separate page. The iSilo document will have a table-of-contents page, taken from the site if possible, with each article on a separate page.

-richreader

  Convert the `page(s)` downloaded into RichReader format using HTML2Doc.exe (see http://users.erols.com/arenakm/palm/RichReader.html ). The `page(s)` will be displayed with a table of contents (taken from the site if possible), followed by all the articles one after another.

-pipe fmt command

  Convert the `page(s)` downloaded into an arbitrary format, using the command provided. Sitescooper will still rewrite the `page(s)` according to the fmt argument, which should be one of:

  text

    Plain text format.

  html

    HTML in one big page.

  mhtml

    HTML in multiple pages.

  The command argument can contain `__SCOOPFILE__`, which will be replaced with the filename of the file containing the rewritten pages in the above format, `__SYNCFILE__`, which will be replaced with a suitable filename in the Palm synchronization folder, and `__TITLE__`, which will be replaced by the title of the file (generally a string containing the date and site name).

  Note that for the -mhtml switch, `__SCOOPFILE__` will be replaced with the name of the file containing the table-of-contents page. It's up to the conversion utility to follow the href links to the other files in that directory.

-dump

  Output the `page(s)` downloaded directly to stdout in text or HTML format, instead of writing them to files and converting each one. This option implies -text; to dump HTML, use -dump -html.

-dumpprc

  Output the `page(s)` downloaded directly to stdout, in converted format as a PRC file, suitable for installation to a Palm handheld.

-nowrite

  Test mode -- do not write to the cache or already_seen file, instead write what would be written normally to a directory called new_cache and a new_already_seen file. This is very handy when writing a new site file.

-debug

  Enable debugging output. This output is in addition to the usual progress messages.

-quiet

  Process sites quietly, without printing the usual progress messages to STDERR. Warnings about incorrect site files and system errors will still be output, however.

-admin cmd

  Perform an administrative command. This is intended to ease the task of writing scripts which use sitescooper output. The following admin commands are available:

  dump-sites

    List the sites which would be scooped on a scooping run, and their URLs. Instead of scooping any sites, sitescooper will exit after performing this task. The format is one site per line, with the site file name first, a tab, the site's URL, a tab, the site name, a tab, and the output filename that would be generated without path or extension. For example:

    foobar.site http://www.foobar.com/ Foo Bar 1999_01_01_Foo_Bar

  journal

    Write a journal with dumps of the documents as they pass through the formatting and stripping steps of the scooping process. This is written to a file called journal in the sitescooper temporary directory.

  import-cookies file

    Import a Netscape cookies file into sitescooper, so that certain sites which require them, can use them. For example, the site economist_full.site requires this. Here's how to import cookies on a UNIX machine:

    sitescooper.pl -admin import-cookies ~/.netscape/cookies

    and on Windows:

    perl sitescooper.pl -admin import-cookies "C:\Program Files\Netscape\Users\Default\cookies.txt"

    Unfortunately, MS Internet Explorer cookies are currently unsupported. If you wish to write a patch to support them, that'd be great.

-nolinkrewrite

  Do not rewrite links on scooped documents -- leave them exactly as they are.

-noheaders

  Do not attach the sitescooper header (URL, site name, and navigation links) to each page.

-nofooters

  Do not attach the sitescooper footer (``copyright retained by original authors'' blurb) to each page.

-fromcache

  Do not perform any network access, retrieve everything from the cache or the shared cache.

-filename template

  Change the format of output filenames. template contains the following keyword strings, which are substituted as follows:

  YYYY

    The current year, in 4-digit format.

  MM

    The current month number (from 01 to 12), in 2-digit format.

  Mon

    The current month name (from Jan to Dec), in 3-letter format.

  DD

    The current day of the month (from 01 to 31), in 2-digit format.

  Day

    The current day of the week (from Sun to Sat), in 3-letter format.

  hh

    The current hour (from 00 to 23), in 2-digit format.

  mm

    The current minute (from 00 to 59), in 2-digit format.

  Site

    The current site's name.

  Section

    The section of the current site (now obsolete).

  The default filename template is YYYY_MM_DD_Site.

-prctitle template

  Change the format of the titles of the resulting PRC files. template may contain the same keyword strings as -filename.

  The default PRC title template is YYYY-Mon-DD: Site.

-nodates

  Do not put the date in the installable file's filename. This allows you to automatically overwrite old files with new ones when you HotSync. It's a compatibility shortcut for -filename Site -prctitle "Site".

-parallel

  Use the LWP::Parallel perl module, if available, to preload certain pages before the single-threaded sitescooper engine gets to them. This can speed up the scooping of several sites at once, but is more prone to crashes as the LWP::Parallel code is not as resilient as the traditional LWP code. This is off by default.

-disc

  Disconnect a PPP connection once the scooping has finished. Currently this code is experimental, and will probably only work on Macintoshes. This is off by default.

-stdout-to file

  Redirect the output of sitescooper into the named file. This is needed on Windows NT and 95, where certain combinations of perl and Windows do not seem to support the &gt; operator.

-keep-tmps

  Keep temporary files after conversion. Normally the .txt or .html rendition of a site is deleted after conversion; this option keeps it around.

# INSTALLATION

To install, edit the script and change the #! line. You may also need to (a) change the Pilot install dir if you plan to use the pilot installation functionality, and (b) edit the other parameters marked with CUSTOMISE in case they need to be customised for your site. They should be set to acceptable defaults (unless I forgot to comment out the proxy server lines I use ;).

# EXAMPLES

            sitescooper.pl http://www.ntk.net/

To snarf the ever-cutting NTKnow newsletter.

            sitescooper.pl -refresh -html http://www.ntk.net/

To snarf NTKnow, ignoring any previously-read text, and producing HTML output.

# ENVIRONMENT

sitescooper makes use of the `$http_proxy` environment variable, if it is set.

# AUTHOR

Justin Mason <jm /at/ jmason.org>

# COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 1999-2000 Justin Mason

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA, or read it on the web at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html .

# SCRIPT CATEGORIES

The CPAN script category for this script is `Web`. See http://www.cpan.org/scripts/ .

# PREREQUISITES

`File::Find` `File::Copy` `File::Path` `FindBin` `Carp` `Cwd` `URI::URL` `LWP::UserAgent` `HTTP::Request::Common` `HTTP::Date` `HTML::Entities`

All these can be picked up from CPAN at http://www.cpan.org/ . Note that `HTML::Entities` is actually included in one of the previous packages, so you do not need to install it separately.

# COREQUISITES

`LWP::Parallel` will be used if available. `Win32::TieRegistry`, if running on a Win32 platform, to find the Pilot Desktop software's installation directory. `Algorithm::Diff` to support diffing sites without running an external diff application (this is required on Mac systems).

# README

Sitescooper downloads news stories from the web and converts them to Palm handheld iSilo, DOC or text format for later reading on-the-move. Site files and full documentation can be found at http://sitescooper.cx/ .