QuickNews and AvantGo
ASP.NET 2.0,
Palm,
Technical stuff,
Website
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I spent yesterday's evening working on the other project occupying me in the moment, which will
link QuickNews to AvantGo (two Palm OS programs which one can use to read RSS feeds). How to link
them? Well, QuickNews is very good because it's fast, efficient and to the point. However,
it doesn't render HTML, it cannot follow links, so sometimes it's just too short. AvantGo, on
the other hand, is a HTML compliant reader, can follow links, can be used to browser online
or offline (you have to synchronize web pages to the Palm's memory first).
So when I find an article in QuickNews that I like, I export it to a memo. The memo generated
bears the entry title, the description, and the link to the full article. Using another
program called VSFTP, I can export the memos to the SD-Card and save them as files. Using the
same program, I can then save all these files to my web server using FTP.
The rest is easy: Create a web application converting these memos to a single webpage,
and then synchronize this page to AvantGo, setting the link depth to 1 (in order to reach
the original articles) or even to 2 (in order to reach pages referenced from the
original article).
The basics work already, so now I still need to add a few functionalities (archiving files
after conversion, deleting single files or all files in archive, etc...) and then I'll be
able to use it on a daily basis. I'll post a demo when it's ready.
Because I am always eager to learn, I use the Visual Studio 2005 Website approach (as opposed
to the Web Application Model) to create that application, and I am not convinced...
I didn't precompile the site, because I wanted to try this by myself, so I really upload the
C# files to the server... it's not very usual for me *S* Well, it's true that it's fast and flexible,
but a few things bug me... OK more about that another time. Now it's late ;-)