RUNNING SITESCOOPER ON A MAC

Due to some differences in the way scripts are run, and the implementation of MacPerl, using sitescooper under MacOS differs quite a lot from under UNIX or Windows.

These instructions come from Andrew Fletcher <fletch /at/ computer.org>, and hopefully will be of help to Mac users who wish to give sitescooper a go.

Under MacOS, sitescooper will not run MakeDoc automatically. In addition, the MacOS version of MakeDoc does not support AppleScript, so you must drag the converted text files to the MakeDoc or iSilo converter applications by hand.

Sitescooper however will provide some commands after all the web pages are scooped, so if you prefer to use MPW Shell to do this, you can cut and paste the command lines directly into the Shell.

Sitescooper requires a recent version of MacPerl; if you don't have an up-to-date installation, you'll get warnings about

Argument "*main::$" isn't numeric in divide. Version 5.2.0r4 is reported to work well.

It also requires LWP and some other Perl modules. To install these, you need to download cpan-mac-0.40.sit.bin from the CPAN perl archive. There's a readme file included; you can either drop it on the Shuck application, as it's in POD format, or SimpleText will do. You will need to read the INSTALLATION section as installation is not obvious. The rest of the readme is probably not relevant.

Anyway, on to Andrew's text:

Once-Off actions, on a new release of sitescooper

(1) It has been reported that MacPerl's size should be increased to 12,000k preferred, in order to run sitescooper.

(2) Run the MacPerl application to open sitescooper.pl and save it as a "Droplet" called "sitescooper". Any editing of the source for configuration purposes should be done using the MacPerl BBEdit menu, before saving. You may additionally need to open it up in BBEdit and "Save As" with the Macintosh Line Breaks option, if you get a warning about \012 characters when you run it. [This should be fixed in recent versions though -- jm]

(3) Double-click on the "sitescooper" icon to run "sitescooper" once. This will make the ...:sitescooper_0:txt folder.

(4) I then make an alias to that folder, call it "Scooped Texts" and put it on the desktop.

Scooping

(1) Double-click on "sitescooper".

(2) When it has finished, I exit it manually. Any messages are shown in a window.

(3) Run the "PPP Disconnect" applescript to (you guessed it) disconnect the PPP connection.

(4) I then open the "Scooped Texts" folder and drag 'n drop the documents made onto MakeDoc68k, which automatically makes the doc documents and puts them where the next Palm HotSync will find them.

(5) I then drag 'n drop the text files to the Wastebasket.

The steps 3 and 5 could be done automatically using an AppleScript. Unfortunately, MakeDoc68k is not AppleScriptable so step 4 needs done manually, so I haven't scripted them as the drag 'n dropping is trivial. If step 4 could be scripted, then sitescooper could use MacPerl's AppleEvent package to run an AppleScript to do steps 3-5, in lieu of the system() call. I'll keep a look out for a different version of MakeDoc68k which is AppleScriptable.

I actually have all the programs in a Launcher window, so that they are buttons, this makes the double-clicking and drag 'n dropping easy. However not all Mac Users like Launcher -- there are many ways of doing the above steps using other tools.

Next: Running Sitescooper


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