Note: This web page was automatically created from a PalmOS "pedit32" memo.

How to make a web site more plucker friendly


1) Plucker isn't the only smallscreen, offline web browser around, but
it is one of the more popular opensource ones, being available for a
number of handhelds, and having multiple "distillers" that condense
web pages to plucker format.  If you want to support plucker directly,
you could get the python plucker distiller, or other compatible program,
and make ".pdb" files available for your articles directly.  This way,
you may be able to reduce your website's bandwidth needs, while at the
same time learning first-hand what plucker folks like in a website -
you can view smallish .pdb's using gtk-plucker on a desktop system,
so you wouldn't necessarily need a PDA to do this.

2) If you want people to be able to distill your articles themselves to
whatever format they prefer, including Plucker, SILO, PalmDOC, etc.:

        2A) It's good to keep the number of links to other articles and
        topics to a minimum, so they can spider just the part they want
        more easily.  
        
        2B) It's a good idea to put the article all on one page, so
        people won't have to spider deeply to get the whole article,
        because if they're spidering deeply they may end up going deeply
        into unneeded parts of your or others' websites.  Slashdot's
        "palm version" is unfortunatley an example of a website that got
        this very wrong.  They make you spider very deeply just to get
        one day's worth of news, because they have about 5 articles per
        page, and you get to the n+1'th page by spidering through the
        n'th - which can lead to slashdot webadmin grief when someone
        links to the regular version of slashdot from the palm version,
        because folks'll start spidering the whole dang website :-S

HTH!
 


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