h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

ffmike, what you're doing is good.
I wish I had the time and the schpunk to be so involved.
You're like the people who are making LINUX into a genuine competitor for microsoft. keep it up. jus small word from me.

Ah, thanks for the vote of confidence. I've been too busy with real work (bleah) to contribute as much as I'd like to lately, but I'm still plugging away at that 250-for-the-year goal. I think this place has the potential to kick some serious butt as an open-source reference, and I'm happy to do my part.

Hi, I keep seeing your name around so thought I'd stop by and say hell
Hello.
I used GuideDog at home and found it useful, unfortunately I can't use it at the moment because the Information Technology Service would very probably kill me
I have lots of respect for your crusade to make H2G2 a better place, and I think people mess around with their pages because they can; thats why I do!
Joanna

Hi Joanna. I just popped by your home page; nice place. Enjoyed your Entry on Evensong as well.

Always nice to hear from a GuideDog user too. I may be tinkering in some more features today. Sorry to hear the evil ITS folks won't let you run that sort of thing, but I suppose it's understandable if they have to support a large user population. I keep hoping the H2G2 folks will release their own offline tools and put me out of business, but it hasn't happened yet.

You called the ITS evil too... thats how I usually describe them...
I'm glad you like Evensong... I keep messing around with the text, but it don't seem to want to make more sense.
Until H2G2 release their own tools you'll be busy; does you're site keep tracks on the number of downloads there have been? I suppose they've got enough things to be dealing with onsite to keep them busy... perhaps one day the search engine will search.

Yeah, I keep track of downloads (handy to run your own server sometimes). As of now it looks like:

GuideDog 108
Thumber 28
H2G2User 44

Of course, some of these are probably upgrades, but it's still a reasonable number of users. Enough to keep me happy and off the streets.

The H2G2 staff have let slip that they are planning to make things avalable as a pure XML feed in the future. Once that happens, it'll be reasonable to contemplate doing an entire off-line reader for H2G2.

Happily I don't need to worry about the term 'offline' for another 6 weeks...
Whats an XML feed? I may have done an A-level in computing but I still remain blissfully ignorant of all things internet! Or rather not blissful, I would like to know.

XML = Extensible Markup Language. It's a standard agreed on by the W3C (standards body for the web) that defines a text-based file for interchanging information between applications. If you've worked on your homepage in GuideML, you've seen XML; GuideML is an XML dialect.

If they make the H2G2 content available as XML, it will be possible to get just the information without all the visual display goo. This will both make downloads faster (for those with XML-enabled browsers, anyhow) because the goo can be kept locally, and enable much easier utility-writing, because parsing XML is trivial compared to digging junk out of the HTML that currently make up the pages.

*light dawns*
I can tell that the Uni's proxy server downloads the goo every time I log on to H2G2, so that when I open a new page it loads really quickly; I suppose this means that it will work like that a bit when I'm at home, too. It will be good if you can make better utilities, I watch your progress with interest.
Having done a view source on some of the pages on here I don't like to think how hard it must be to get out meaningful information...

The other nice thing about having the data as XML is that it will make H2G2 "skinnable". There's a corresponding standard called XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) that specifies how to display XML data. So you can have the same XML available and choose an XSL stylesheet to format it for your browser. Indeed, since it's an open standard there's no reason why we can't have third parties designing new looks for H2G2 once they go that route.

Parsing the HTML isn't really all that difficult; it's just string processing. The main problem is that it's fragile. If TDV revises anything about the pages, it'll break HTML-parsing utilities, while (with some care) XML-based ones should continue to work.

That would be cool; I notice your pet peeve of the week being white on blue Although I think that Microsoft Word has an option to make text on a page white on blue because its supposedly easier to read, or at least less likely to give you a headache... other studies show that it takes our brains longer to process blue, I think...

Fragility is a problem. I suppose for now you get to hope they don't make changes.

And good morning to you, too

Morning! or rather evening. I don't quite know what I did there