How you use Spyder depends on a couple of situations.
At the risk of offending you, I am going to include a portion of the
manual then interject some comments in your original message:
One of the best features about Book Port is the ability to take your
reading with you wherever you go. Unfortunately, current news,
especially local news, is a problem, because it takes too much time to
individually send Web pages of your local paper or favorite magazine.
Spyder changes all that. With Spyder, you get a Web page, then tell the
program where you want to start and where you want to end, and the
program grabs each link on the page, downloads the target of that link,
puts a section marker at the beginning of each page, then sends the
whole file to your Book Port at once. Of course, if your Book Port is
not connected, the Book Port Transfer software queues up the files, so
you may instruct Windows Scheduler to run Spyder before you arise in the
morning, then connect the unit to grab the queued files before you leave
for work.
There are several ways to start Spyder. One is to point to a Web page
with Internet Explorer then press the Applications key or right click.
When the context menu appears, select Book Port Spyder. You may also
pick Book Port Spyder from the icon in the Book Port's program group.
The final way to start the program is with one of the icons that you
create from within the program.
The method you use to start Spyder depends on what you are doing. If
you run across a Web page for the first time or decide you want to start
getting the content of that page, you would normally open Spyder through
Internet Explorer's context menu while you are viewing that page in
Internet Explorer. You then move to the Links list for that page on
Spyder's main screen. Once in the Links list, set the Begin and End
links to reflect the content you want to send to Book Port.
If you want to grab the contents of that Web site now, move back to the
item in the list that represents the link where you want to start, then
press the Go button.
If the Web site is one that you want to use fairly often, use Spyder's
Create Shortcut button to create a desktop icon that opens Spyder and
grabs the links you specified. To use that new shortcut, simply point to
it on the desktop and press Enter. The shortcut will launch Spyder with
command line parameters that let it know to start grabbing the specified
range of links from that Web page.
mmccarty@xxxxxxx Wednesday, July 13, 2005 2:58:47 PM >>>
The Spider program really is confusing to me, so I'm going to ask you
good folks how it works?
I understand that you start with a URL, and bring up the Spider by
using the context menu. I see the links on the Spider page, and I
highlight the first link that I want to save. Once I highlight the
link, I hit ALT+B for Begin. I then go back to the list of links and
highlight the link that I want to have saved last, and hit the ALT+E
for
End. I then chose the Go button, and after a few seconds, I get some
sounds.
LS: if you just want this page one time, you do not need to hit the
Begin button. The key here is that the Go button starts with the
highlighted link, so in this case, you want to first highlight the end
link and hit alt+e. Next move to the first link and hit alt+g to Go.
I assume the program has done its thing, so now, what do I do? I
guess
if I choose Save, the program would try to send this information to
the
Book Port, I didn't have mine connected at the time, so the Save
button
didn't seem to work. Question, is there a way to look at the file
that
is going to be sent to the Book Port? Is one large file sent to the
BP,
or several files for each link between your start and end positions?
LS: The Save button actually creates a desktop icon with the beginning
and end link markers. That icon is used so you don't have to mark the
start and end link everytime.
You may look in your Pending folder to see the file. Spyder creates
one large file with section markers between the articles.
Michael McCarty
Fred's Head Database Coordinator
American Printing House for the Blind
Phone: 502 895-2405
Fax: 502 899-2363
www.aph.org
