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Just to keep everyone apprised of what I've been doing in my quiet
time (besides cranking out 4 pilot-link releases this past month and trying
to find employment), I'm now putting the finishing touches on two new tools
with quite a bit of beneficial Plucker functionality. These are going to be
rolled into the new website, but I'll launch the tools in a few days once
I'm done debugging them and running them through an audit.. I'll need
everyone to bang on them to make sure they're rock solid, before I announce
them officially on the front-page of the website.
pdf2pdb, convert .rtf, .doc, .pdf to Plucker format
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I've cleaned up the code quite a bit from the current version, and
stuffed in some more features, and now it will allow you to convert
Rich Text Format (.rtf) documents, Microsoft Word native documents
(.doc), as well as the standard Portable Document Format (.pdf) and
Postscript documents. I found a small flaw when testing in POSE, if
a Word document had a long title (longer than 32 characters seems to
be the breaking point), and I managed to fix that with a little
substr() massaging, but it needs a bit more testing before I'm
confident in stamping it with the Seal of Approval(tm).
pler, the [Pl]ucker [E]mail [R]eflector (a play on words)
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After lying dormant for quite some time, I've now revived it and
added the current Plucker options. For those who don't know what
this is, it's an email-only interface to Plucker. You simply email a
small template to a user on the Plucker server (which is actually my
shiny new perl script), it will parse the values found in the
template, and fetch the content, pack it up into a .pdb file for
you, and attach it to an email reply to you. Here's an example of
what the template looks like:
[template]
url = http://www.slashdot.org/palm/
maxdepth = 2
bpp = 4
title= Slashdot Daily News
AvantGo = No # Is this an AvantGo Channel?
# ... and so on
Many people don't want to set up the tools necessary to run Plucker,
so I wrote this to allow them to take advantage of Plucker without
having to set up Python, Java, or anything else. Additionally, you
can use this through a firewall (as long as the firewall lets you
get email and attachments of course). If you're on a friend's
computer and don't want to install Plucker and risk damaging their
configuration, or you're running on a platform we don't currently
support, you can use 'pler' to still use Plucker while away from
your home system.
The other benefit that pler can do, is build you a configuration for
your platform, plucker.ini for Windows, ~/.pluckerrc for POSIX
systems such as Linux, OSX, and Unix. I'm working on perfecting the
home.html and plucker.ini attachments this week.
These two tools are also being rolled into the new Plucker website
layout, which now has a very robust Build It section so you can
build your own configuration or Plucker documents by filling out a
simple form and submitting it. There's quite a bit of intentional
overlap with the tools and the website now as well, they're quite
tightly integrated. Once it's all rolled up together, you'll be able
to point Build-It, pler, or foo2pdb to Microsoft Word, Rich Text
Format, HTML, Text, and PDF documents and have them converted into
Plucker format. I also have a very alpha conversion for Peanut Press
format doc files, but there's obvious copyright issues with making
that publically available.
Eventually, these will also become the back-end for the
http://my.plkr.org/ website, where you can actually create your own
account, set up your own pluckings, and sync to the server,
automagically. That's probably 6 months off from this point though.
I'm currently fixing/updating the Upload Samples section, a new
arrival to the Plucker website, which will allow you to upload your
own Plucker .pdb files for other users to download and read for
themselves. I've taken extra pains to make sure that the files are
correct, not corrupted, and of the right format for redistribution.
Due to possible copyright issues, each file will have to be approved
before going public, but the approval process is very easy. I may
add the ability to vote on the ones you all find to be the best of
each category.
If anyone has suggestions for tools, options, ideas, or
