The InfoAgent Suite contains three major components:
WebWatcher
SearchEngine UI
BookmarkManager
Start it by InfoAgent go ! 2
WebWatcher
The WebWatcher tracks changes in WWW pages.
It maintains a list of WebDocument objects which are checked periodically for changes.
If the WebWatcher detects any changes, it will perform certain methods on the respective WebDocument (e.g. mark it as changed, display it in a Scamper window, or play a signal sound...)
The actual Methods can be freely configured, see entry for #changeActions under InfoAgent configuration edit.
Most of WebWatchers actions can be logged to the Transcript, by setting #doLogging to true in the configuration.
In the BookmarkManager the WebWatcher actions can be reached from the yellow button menu of the entry "Tracked Documents".
You can start tracking WebPages from Scamper with the menu action "add to bookmarks" and placing the entry into the category "Tracked Documents"
SearchEngine UI
The SearchEngine maintains a list of Internet searchengines. You can use any of these for your internet recherche.
Try something like: SearchEngine Dmoz searchAndBrowse: 'Squeak'.
SearchEngine Dmoz searchAndManage: 'Squeak' will result in a more sophisticated representation of the search results:
The resulting page is scanned for urls and the found urls are placed in a special category 'Search Results' into the BookmarkManager (BM). Finally the BM is openened and you can start do work with your freshly generated bookmarks.
The SearchEngine can be reached from Scamper ("search the web") and from the BookmarkManager (yellow button menu on category "Web Search")
BookmarkManager
The BookmarkManager maintains all Bookmarks used throughout the InfoAgent suite:
Documents tracked by WebWatcher are kept in the BookmarkCategory 'WebWatched Documents'.
(you can mark WebSites as "webwatched" by dragging them into this category.)
Search results from web searches are kept in the category 'Search Results'.
There is a 'Trash' folder where you place stuff you don't need any longer.
You can add any links from the WebBrowser to any Category.
You can create new Categories and manage everything by drag-and-drop.
BM marks entries are displayed in three different colours according to their status:
New entries are marked orange, if Webwatcher detects a change it will mark the entry red.
After visiting the entry via "open in web browser" it is marked green.
BM can export its Bookmarks as a standard Netscape Navigator Bookmark file.
Netscape Navigator bookmark files can be imported.
When file in/out bookmarks for the first time, you are asked to point to a file.
BM will use this file for reading and writing its bookmarks. To prevent unintended data loss
a backup of the original file is saved initially.
If you point to your Netscape bookmarkfile, you share the bookmarks file between
Netscape and squeak.
Has been tested with Netscape 4.7 under Linux and WinNT.
The context menu of the BookmarkManager provides all kind of useful actions
according to the selected item.
Open BM by BookmarkManager explore. or from Scamper by "edit bookmarks"
Known bugs and shortcomings:
Tested only under Linux and WinNT.
WebWatcher detects ALL changes in HTML documents. Sometimes WebServers send hidden tags to the clients which donīt alter the page content proper. But WebWatcher will detect these "invisible" changes too and thus "fail".
Netscape seems to read its bookmark file only on startup and to write to it only on termination.
Thus there is no proper synchronization between Netscape and InfoAgent if you let them share
a bookmark-file :-(
You have therefor to be a bit careful to avoid loss of newly added bookmarks.
If you have any ideas how to let Netscape read and write its bookmark-file programmatically
please let me know!
Disclaimer:
This software is provided as is. No warranty of any kind.
Published under the GPL. Copyright by Thomas Mahler, 1999,2000