[ignatz]

Part 2 - Basic Scooping

So what's in here? Lots of stuff with strange extensions but no .exe files so how the heck do you get it running? Well for those of you who want to leap into the breach, here's the quick way to get started. Write a simple batch file. That's a little text file that runs shell commands. Open your favorite text editor and type this (without the quotes): "perl sitescooper.pl -misilox". (Note that this will work only for iSilo users. If you want to use Plucker or something else, see below in Part 4.) Save it as "sitescooper.bat" also in the top level of your "sitescooper-3.1.3" folder. The .bat extension is critical, as this is what lets Windows know that there are commands to be run. Now if you double click on the sitescooper.bat, a command window will open and stuff will start happening. A text file will pop up with hundreds and hundreds of sites. Scan through the document and put an "X" in the brackets in front of any site that you want scooped. Don't be in a rush to get a ton of sites right away. It's a huge overwhelming list. Pick one or two that you want to see work and put the X's in. Save the text file and close it. The action will continue in the cmd window. Then it will vanish. Now do a sync. If all has gone well and I haven't made too many errors, your scooped files should be in your RAM and readable from iSilo! Congrats!

So assuming all went well, what now? Well, if you want to add or subtract sites, you can go into your "tmp" directory and directly edit the file there called "site_choices.txt". But there's a better (IMHO) way. If you picked any sites from the site_choices file, edit it and remove them. Create a folder in the top level of the sitescooper directory called "sites". Now browse the folder called site samples. Any site that you want, copy it into the sites folder. Now if nothing is marked in the site_choices file, Sitescooper will read from your sites directory and scoop anything that's there. (Even if something is marked in the site_choices file, I think that Sitescooper will do both those files and the files in the sites directory...) Be aware that a lot of the .site files are outdated and some no longer work. If everything seems right, but it's not working, then try a different site before you give up on it.