I was talking to Bryan today about Plucker. I was originally going to e-mail him, but I figured I’d post about it here as well.
Plucker is an offline web browser for the Palm (screenshots). It has a PC-component that downloads websites that you specify, converts them to Palm-friendly format, and queues them for your next Hotsync into your Palm. The Plucker-viewer resides on the Palm to view the pages.
Sounds like AvantGo? Well, it is similar, but better. Unlike AvantGo, Plucker is free (well, the basic AvantGo with 2 MB capacity is free, but the 8 MB version is $19.95/year). And, while AvantGo actually charges websites to be accessible by AvantGo, you can also pluck any page on the web (though it has an easier time with pages that are enhanced for mobile devices).
Plucker is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
Update 2/13: Changed URL for plucker friendly pages (the PDA Sized URL Wiki is more up-to-date).
It also seems to be very agressive in what it downloads. For instance, I notice in my access log that your daily(?) Plucker crawl of my blog downloads not only the main page but also individual permalinked posts, comments pages, and all months of my archive since they’re listed in the sidebar, and does so as fast as possible, slamming my server for as long as it takes.
Is there a way to configure it to be less aggressive?
Oops, sorry about that! Plucker accepts regular expressions for an only-follow-these-URLs parameter, and I’ll put that to use :).
Iwant to try it
Yoniko: All right, good for you. Just go to the Plucker download page and go for it :).
I’ve been experimenting with Plucker Desktop and the Viewer – and have been a little dissappointed with both. Maybe my fault – perhaps you can enlighten me.
First, on installing Plucker Desktop it persistantly crashed when ever I tried to ‘Update a Chennel’, etc. I eventually noticed that the Distiller files were different from those containes in the Distiller zip file.
Also, there were no files in the /plucker/parser folder – the programme was craching when I tried to Update of do anything to a Channel.
I had to manually copy them from the plucker_parser zip file. As well, I also copied the other .py and .pyc files across (they have later file dates).
Not an auspicious start !
Then, when I did get it going the viewer won’t properly display an HTML page structured in Tables (and, yes my HTML is OK). I’ll admit I’m using Palm Emulator, instead of an actual hand-held – but it should work.
So far, I’m not overly impressed. As well Plucker themselves seem a bit tardy in their responses to my emails.
Basically, I’m wanting to use something like Plucker to develop some historical eBooks.
If you have time, I’d be interested in hearing of your experiences with Plucker.