Avantslash version 3.1
Copyright (c) Richard Lawrence 2000-2005
Released under the GNU GPL.

Abstract
--------

AvantSlash allows you to read Slashdot on your Palm or WinCE device
(through Avantgo or other PDA web browser - iSilo and Plucker are two other 
examples) or via a WAP enabled mobile phone.

You could point Avantgo directly at the Slashdot website, but you'll find
that due to the sheer mass of links, your limit will be reached pretty
quickly. You could point Avantgo at the palm version of Slashdot at 
http://www.slashdot.org/palm but it has a number of problems. Here is what 
Scott Tringali had to say about it on kuro5hin:

----
For a few brief months, I had the privilege of reading That Other Site on 
my Palm. I downloaded it on a whim, not thinking it would even be useful. 
But then as I was standing line at the grocery store, or at Jiffy Lube, or 
waiting at the doctor's office, I realized how cool it was. Then they 
killed it, and I'm mad (I'll explain later).

First of all, this [http://www.slashdot.org/palm] is a great example of 
how not to write a Palm version of the site, and here's why. Offline 
readers depend on "link-depth" to traverse a site. However, their Palm 
version breaks each story into a random number of small chunks. So, you 
can't just page-down to read a long story or a bunch of comments- you 
have to click on lots and lots of links.  A real pain. Lots of small links 
makes sense on a slow online connection, but it's awful when you have more 
bandwidth available, as your desktop PC or an offline browser.

Additionally, it's restricted to 10 comments, not a threshold. That's 
boring. I'm sitting here in Jiffy Lube picking my nose, I wanna read some 
funny trolls and flamewars!

Finally, using /. in "light" mode doesn't work either. There are too many 
useless links on the front page. I don't care about the advertising or the 
FAQ or all the other stuff: I want the stories and the comments. 
Basically, the readers I use so far have no way to "prune" sections of the 
tree you don't care about. This causes the site to be gigantic and not fit 
into the paltry 8MB of your typical handheld, or, it fits, but it so big 
as to detract from its usefulness.

Finally, someone did the right thing: AvantSlash takes the page, filters 
out all the crap you don't care about, and doesn't break it up into a 
thousand chunks so it's readable.

(from - http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/994372874_PNdNHhjk/24#24)
----

And here is what Bernd Sieker on the Plucker mailing list said:

----
I'm not the original poster, but this [http://slashdot.org/palm] is
_not_ really useful. Why in the world is there not one big index with,
say, 20 or 50 entries, instead of several small index pages. This
totally breaks the concept of having a maxdepth. You get all the
articles from the first page, only the /. abstract on the second, and
on the third page no links at all are followed.
----

So there you have it, the slashdot palm friendly version is believed to be 
(by two people at least) not very good.

AvantSlash takes the pages, runs it though some perl and outputs PDA 
and WAP friendly content. That is all the interesting stuff and none of the 
rubbish. You won't have useless links and best of all its customisable 
just the way you want it.


Licence
-------

This is released under the GNU GPL. You can find more details about that 
in the file "LICENCE". In short, you can do what you want with this as 
long as if you redistribute it, you use the same licence. Making money out 
of this script is a no-no. Also, I cannot be held responsible if it blows 
or does something nasty. Or if the Slashdot editors ban your site for 
using this.


Installation
------------

You need perl version 5 or greater plus the LWP package (which is standard
on most distributions). Stick the avantify.cgi file in your public_html
directory or wherever it needs to be to be accessed via the web.

If you're on unix, use "chmod 755 avantify.cgi" (without quotes) to make
the file executable. Once you've done that use your web-browser to visit
the script and you should see the slashdot content!

If you've enabled the local cache you need to ensure that the "cache" 
directory is writable to by the webserver. If you're running under UNIX 
you may find that this works without any modifications however, if not, 
you may want to do "chmod 777 cache" and try again.


Customisation
-------------

AvantSlash can be customised to your viewing preferences. This is achieved
through the use of a plain text configuration file that resides in the
same location as the avantify.cgi script. It is called "avantify.config".

# VERY IMPORTANT NOTICE!
# AvantSlash will need to know the location of this config file. To do this,
# you need to edit avantify.cgi and change the line that starts "chdir" to
# contain the correct path. If you get it wrong, nothing will work. You may
# find that placing a hash (#) before the line may work too depending on
# the set-up of your webserver.

Once the page is displaying correctly, then the best thing to do is read the
comments within the config file and make the changes as you like. Some of
them are just cosmetic, others will reduce the size of the channel quite
dramatically.

If you are using a WAP enabled phone to view the page then AvantSlash has
some built-in settings which will always override the ones in the config
file. You can edit the code to change these, but it isn't recommended as
it'll make the page size rather big.


Using on a PDA
--------------

You can either visit the site from your PDA or use something like Avantgo
or iSilo to create a channel. With avantgo, log in, create a new channel
and use the following suggested settings:

Title: Slashdot
Location: http://path.to/your.script/avantify.cgi
Maximum channel size: 300k (at least)
Link depth: 2
Include images: yes
Follow offsite links: no
Refresh: Every 1 hour

Once you've done that, sync your pda and slashdot should appear!


Using on a WAP phone
--------------------

The WAP version is accessed by entering the avantify URL into your mobile
phone. It uses a special set of options (so overriding your own ones) and
uses the Google HTML to WML convertor.

Although writing WAP pages wouldn't be a problem, the conversion of user
comments would be more difficult and require a convertor. Rather than
re-invent the wheel, the Google one is used because it's free and works
very well.


Contents last updated: 1st June 2005
