> I am certainly open to what to call the things other than channels; it
> is easier to specify the term now than more time spent rewriting things.
I understand that. It would be harder to have to "undo" anything we
implement now, using a term that doesn't fully explain our architecture and
design that we've built around Plucker and supporting scripts.
> All the other GUI subscribed portable Palm web systems I have ever seen
> use the term channel, probably for easier first user/migration, and the
> fact that new people are familiar with the concept of a 'channel' in the
> real world, as being some content that is delivered onto your device by
> specifing where to dial into the originating source.
The only one I know of that does this is AvantGo.
Sitescooper uses "scoops" or "nightly scoops", for example. I'm not
aware of any others that actually ACTIVELY pull content from sites and parse
it for a digestable view on the Palm.
In fact, I was looking to see if they even had a trademark on this,
and it seems, though not specific, they have some interesting open
trademarks:
http://www.nameprotect.com/cgi-bin/FREESearch/search.cgi?action=SEARCH&db=PTO&ss=avantgo&imageField.x=10&imageField.y=11
What's interesting is their "Avantgo Dot Com" one:
071107 - Dwellings, buildings, monuments, stadiums, fountains,
structural works, and building materials
260302 - Geometric figures and solids
260312 - Geometric figures and solids
260321 - Geometric figures and solids
However, I have a bit more of a fundamental issue with calling these
things a "channel", and I've talked to a couple of people about this, so let
me try to explain/aggregate my/our thoughts.
A "channel" in the current paradigm (i.e. AvantGo) is generally
thought of as a "push" service, where content is aggregated at the server,
pre-prepared, converted, and then pushed down to the end-user's Palm device.
They "subscribe" to "channels", and then sync, and the content magically
appears on their palm. To the users, they think they're "pulling" content,
but in fact, they're being pushed prepared content from one server to their
Palm device. No problems, makes some sense.
With Plucker, the user initiates a script/gui/whatever, which goes
out on the LIVE internet, gathers content from live sites, which may be up,
down, or slow, and then parses it locally, which creates a file they have to
sync to their Palm.
At no point were *WE* (Plucker) involved in the access, structure,
or availability of this content. In fact, we only provide a client-side
parser, the rest is completely out of our control. It comes from anywhere
from 1 to thousands of live sites.
To contrast the two, we're hitting live content provider sites,
which present unprepared content to Plucker (i.e. not necessarily formatted
to fit on the Palm screen), where the users using AvantGo have to sign in,
and are pushed content that was batched on a schedule, and parsed for them.
Calling what we do a "channel" is misleading in this aspect.
Channels in the vein of telecommunications or television, indicates that you
have something "canned" for your viewing pleasure (or displeasure of late),
which has been audited/edited to suit your medium. This doesn't apply in our
case, for a majority (most) of our users who use Plucker.
> Nevertheless, terms can be created that aren't always the most
> intuitive. But for myself, any other term that I could think of, pretty
> well would have in the help file this phrase: "Well, it's like a
> channel" to describe what the term actually meant.
I get this every day too, when people see me using Plucker, running
Plucker, from usenet posts, and people emailing me from links on the website
or whatever. Bill Janssen is starting to get some emails now as well.
Describing what Plucker *IS* is not hard, but describing what it
*DOES* and *HOW* it does that, can be difficult for some general users to
grasp. If I introduce the channel aspect, to speed the explanation process,
they understand the "what", but they have a completely incorrect idea as to
the "how".
> Some of the possibilities:
> --Document: (ties with viewer's Document manager well).
Documements can be stored in Plucker, so this fits well. Is a
document a "channel"? Likely not. Can you "pluck" a document? Yep. Here we
introduce the nature of "plucks" (suggested by another user, just today
online. I think I've tossed the term around before also)
> --Database: the former name of Library manager.
Content is stored in a database or databases. This also fits, but
one does not make a channel of "databases", however one can have "database
of channels". One can also pluck content into a database.
> --Ebook, Site, File, Plucker File, Plucker Document, Plucker Channel,
> Plucker Database. Still don't know of a suggestion that would cover it
> well and be helpful to new users also.
Again, ebooks can be stored in Plucker's database format. It is
parsed and converted. Is it an "ebook channel"? Likely not. You *CAN*,
however, have a "weather channel" or a "sports channel", and those paradigms
somewhat fit, if only "familiar" to those people with televisions (luckily I
am not one of them =)
> For FAQ, I think these are questions people may have regardless.
> "How come Plucker can't sync with AvantGo channels?"
> --This is how I would answer this if someone on the street asked me
> this: "(i) Part of the licensing agreement of an AvantGo channel into
> the AvantGo list of channels is that there are blockers to prevent any
> other competing browser from accessing the directory holding an AvantGo
> channel. (ii) Good designers use compliant HTML and standard components,
> and extended/new language depreciates well across all browsers. If
> poorly designed by the content author, AvantGo channels can be peppered
> with non-standard crap that isn't read by every other browser".
If this is a real FAQ question, let's explain the differences.
AvantGo, by license, requires that content providers restrict both the
number of users that can access the content, as well as the mechanism they
can access the content from (specifically using the AvantGo browser only).
These can be easily bypassed in a lot of cases, but this should not be the
approach to gaining access to this content. Knock on the door, don't kick it
down. Politely email the content provider and ask for permission to use his
AvantGo site, or have him create one for Plucker users, which does not put
him/her in violation of their existing AvantGo agreement.
It's also important to note that AvantGo *RESTRICTS* content from
users and content providers. It does not in any way open it up at all. I've
had some pretty lengthy discussions with a lot of AvantGo content providers,
and all of them agree that they're put under extremely tight restrictive
agreements from AvantGo, and that heavy fines ensue of they violate any part
of that agreement. It's expensive to become an "authorized" AvantGo content
provider, and really, for no reason.
> "How do I add a channel from your website?"
> --This is a fair enough question and would probably be answered in a
> sentence or two describing the different ways of addding that are
> available. Interesting to see that content sites are starting to answer
> this question themselves and for a larger variety of viewer platforms,
> like the Sydney Morning Herald:
> http://www.smh.com.au/handheld/howto.html
It would not be that hard to create a server and subscription-style
service to create "Daily Plucks" or something like that. The only
limitations are 1.) bandwidth, 2.) permission from content providers, 3.)
storage size and probably some other minor issues. Remmebering that at the
server side, AvantGo is technically no different than Plucker, except they
have all of their content stored in a database, by row and page/link.
Ideally it happens like this:
A user requests a daily schedule of CNN.com for example, to a depth
of 3, no images. If this "channel" doesn't exist in AvantGo already, it is
added as a new channel. Every day, this "job" runs which gathers this
content as requested, and the database is updated with the content.
A second user then comes along and says he wants CNN.com hourly,
WITH images, and to a depth of 10. The original record for CNN.com is
modified, preferences for images are added and the maxdepth is changed. Now
every hour, the content is fetched from CNN.com, and compared with the data
in the database itself and stored there.
When the first user comes back after 24 instances of the second
user's record have been gathered (this being the same record of course),
when the actual data structures are gathered (our plucker-build, though run
on content stored in a database), the images are ignored, and maxdepth is
capped at 3. When the second user comes along, he gets the full record, with
images and with his maxdepth of 10.
Seems logical enough. We can definately improve upon this, with an
easy front end to the gather/parse/store process. There's some interesting
caching/rsync/zlib tools we can use to severely limit the amount of wasted
content gathering we do for this.
The question for the class though is, do we want a Plucker Server,
filled with user-submitted content and populated with the 600 or so
Palm-formatted URLs I have in my PODS system here? Or do we want to leave it
all client side still?
/d
