Pre-Made Scoops for our Regular Members

[Alexander Turcic]

We now have a beta section where our regular members (everyone with 20 or more posts) can download pre-made scoops in iSilo format (Plucker will follow).

These scoops are regularly updated (several times a day). The list of scoops is expanding, and currently includes: The Economist, Reuters, NZZ, The Inquirer.

MobileRead.com Team

[ignatz]

Alex, this looks really cool! How did you get the Economist scoop to work?! It looks great! Thanks for this service.

I would love to have a few NYTimes sections up here too, if possible. Maybe National, International,Technology, and Week in Review?

Fantastic work!

[Alexander Turcic]

Thanks for the compliments I will add those NYT sections; are your .site files ready or do we have to optimize them further?

[ignatz]

I never finished the final mods to the .site files because I couldn't figure out the proper implementation of the code. But for those sections they should work fine. The problem only arises in sections like Movies or Health where there are commonly articles older than 10 days. In the more "newsy" sections, there are never any posts that old, so there is no problem!

The only note that I would add is that my .site file is designed for one large scoop, containing all the sections a user would want. It is based on a local HTML file. So, if you plan to do it section-wise, you will simply have to have multiple html files, that each point to only one section, and a scoop for each of these sections. However, the rest of the .site file can probably stay the same, with the exception of the pointer to the HTML file. I could do these mods for you, if you like, but not until tomorrow...

[Alexander Turcic]

Originally Posted by ignatz

I could do these mods for you, if you like, but not until tomorrow...

Lemme think about it and the easiest way how we can do that.

[Tanker Bob]

FoxNews scoups would be great. These are a nice touch.

[gyffes]

Fox News? Don't you mean, White House State News Service?

Alex, any chance you can set up something like this for Mobipocket? I prefer reading news in landscape mode.

As always, thank you for your work on our behalf.

[ignatz]

and how did you make the Economist scoop work?

[jasondv]

Cool, Alexander Thanks!

[Alexander Turcic]

Well, I used the same .site file Morpheus posted earlier. I only added images to it.

Then, I did some changes to the sitescooper itself. As recommended by stobs, I changed the default user agent to something like "Internet Explorer" to hide sitescooper. To do so, you must edit /lib/Sitescooper/Main.pm:

Find (around line 977)

PHP Code:

  $self->{useragent}->agent ("sitescooper/$VERSION ($self->{home_url}) ".
          $self->{useragent}->agent); 


and change it to

PHP Code:

  $self->{useragent}->agent ("Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"); 


That did the trick here at least.

Greets

[ignatz]

Originally Posted by Alexander

As recommended by stobs, I changed the default user agent to something like "Internet Explorer" to hide sitescooper.

That's a great find. I had understood (though don't know where I read it now...) that you could not spoof with sitescooper. There's a couple of other sites that I've been working on that this may help with. Great work Alex.

[Alexander Turcic]

Originally Posted by ignatz

That's a great find. I had understood (though don't know where I read it now...) that you could not spoof with sitescooper. There's a couple of other sites that I've been working on that this may help with. Great work Alex.

Np I think together we can make Sitescooper even better. For what it's worth, I could also turn 'user-agent' into a .site option.

[Alexander Turcic]

Gyffes, Mobipocket I am afraid won't be possible because it lacks a linux-compatible console tool to generate ebooks, right? I will try and see what I can do about it.

[kezza]

Any chance of adding PIC mobile (http://www.palminfocenter.com/mobile), CS Monitor (text edition at http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/red...pl?textEdition), and/or Wired (http://www.wired.com/wireless)? I'd love to use this to gather up my morning reading, rather than running iSiloX, because I'm lazy like that.
Plus, I don't think I'm the only one that likes to read those sites regularly.

[Alexander Turcic]

Originally Posted by kezza

... I'd love to use this to gather up my morning reading, rather than running iSiloX, because I'm lazy like that.
Plus, I don't think I'm the only one that likes to read those sites regularly.

Sure can do that for you :P Though the primary purpose of this here is to have scoops of non-mobile pages available that aren't easily converted with iSiloX.