AvantSlash Copyright (c) Richard Lawrence and Han-Kwang Nienhuys 2000-2011 Released under the GNU GPL. Abstract -------- AvantSlash allows you to read Slashdot on a Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Smartphone or Palm based device (either online using a web-browser or offline using an application such as AvantGo) or from an older WAP enabled mobile phone. You could use the Slashdot website but you'll find that, due to the sheer mass of links and non-essential content, navigation will be painfully slow and (if you're using an offline browser) your limit will be reached pretty quickly. Alternatively, you could use the dedicated Palm version of Slashdot but it has a number of problems. Here is what Scott Tringali had to say about it on kuro5hin: For a few brief months, I had the privilege of reading That Other Site on my Palm. I downloaded it on a whim, not thinking it would even be useful. But then as I was standing line at the grocery store, or at Jiffy Lube, or waiting at the doctor's office, I realized how cool it was. Then they killed it, and I'm mad (I'll explain later). First of all, this [http://www.slashdot.org/palm] is a great example of how not to write a Palm version of the site, and here's why. Offline readers depend on "link-depth" to traverse a site. However, their Palm version breaks each story into a random number of small chunks. So, you can't just page-down to read a long story or a bunch of comments- you have to click on lots and lots of links. A real pain. Lots of small links makes sense on a slow online connection, but it's awful when you have more bandwidth available, as your desktop PC or an offline browser. Additionally, it's restricted to 10 comments, not a threshold. That's boring. I'm sitting here in Jiffy Lube picking my nose, I wanna read some funny trolls and flamewars! Finally, using /. in "light" mode doesn't work either. There are too many useless links on the front page. I don't care about the advertising or the FAQ or all the other stuff: I want the stories and the comments. Basically, the readers I use so far have no way to "prune" sections of the tree you don't care about. This causes the site to be gigantic and not fit into the paltry 8MB of your typical handheld, or, it fits, but it so big as to detract from its usefulness. Finally, someone did the right thing: AvantSlash takes the page, filters out all the crap you don't care about, and doesn't break it up into a thousand chunks so it's readable. (http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/994372874_PNdNHhjk/24#24) Here is what Bernd Sieker on the Plucker mailing list said: I'm not the original poster, but this [http://slashdot.org/palm] is _not_ really useful. Why in the world is there not one big index with, say, 20 or 50 entries, instead of several small index pages. This totally breaks the concept of having a maxdepth. You get all the articles from the first page, only the /. abstract on the second, and on the third page no links at all are followed. So there you have it, the slashdot palm friendly version is believed to be (by two people at least) not very good. AvantSlash takes the pages, runs it though some perl and outputs PDA and WAP friendly content. That is all the interesting stuff and none of the rubbish. You won't have useless links and best of all its customisable just the way you want it. Licence ------- This is released under the GNU GPL. You can find more details about that in the file "LICENCE". In short, you can do what you want with this as long as if you redistribute it, you use the same licence. I would like to make it very clear that I can not and will not be held responsible if it blows up, does something nasty or gets your site banned by the Slashdot editors. You use it at your own risk. Installation ------------ You need perl version 5 or greater plus the LWP package (which is standard on most distributions). Stick the avantify.cgi file in your public_html directory or wherever it needs to be to be accessed via the web. If you're on Linux/UNIX, use "chmod 755 avantify.cgi" (without quotes) to make the file executable. Once you've done that use your web-browser to visit the script and you should see the slashdot content! If you've enabled the local cache you need to ensure that the "cache" directory is writable to by the webserver. If you're running under UNIX you may find that this works without any modifications however, if not, you may want to do "chmod 777 cache" and try again. You may wish to protect your AvantSlash installation against unauthorized use; you probably don't want your site to be found by Google. In the directory authenticate/ you can find an example .htaccess and login.html Customisation ------------- AvantSlash can be customised to your viewing preferences and is achieved in one of two ways. If you want to change the way the page looks then you can can do this from the "About/Preferences" page which will allow you to modify the way the pages render on a per-device basis - this means that it could be different for your iPhone, your Kindle and your desktop PC. The second way is through the use of a plain text configuration file that resides in the same location as the avantify.cgi script. It is called "avantify.config". These preferences are applied across all devices. Once the page is displaying correctly, then the best thing to do is read the comments within the config file and make the changes as you like. Some of them are just cosmetic, others will reduce the size of the channel quite dramatically. If you are using a WAP enabled phone to view the page then AvantSlash has some built-in settings which will always override the ones in the config file. You can edit the code to change these, but it isn't recommended as it'll make the page size rather big. Tracking -------- AvantSlash will automatically check for updates and inform you if a new release is available. When checking for updates, it will send some information to the avantslash server for statistical purposes. More precisely, it will send your current version number, user agent, and style settings. If you don't like it, disable update checking or change the code. Using on a PDA -------------- You can either visit the site from your PDA or use something like Avantgo or iSilo to create a channel. With avantgo, log in, create a new channel and use the following suggested settings: Title: Slashdot Location: http://path.to/your.script/avantify.cgi Maximum channel size: 300k (at least) Link depth: 2 Include images: yes Follow offsite links: no Refresh: Every 1 hour Once you've done that, sync your pda and slashdot should appear! Using on a WAP phone -------------------- The WAP version is accessed by entering the avantify URL into your mobile phone. It uses a special set of options (so overriding your own ones) and uses the Google HTML to WML convertor. Although writing WAP pages wouldn't be a problem, the conversion of user comments would be more difficult and require a convertor. Rather than re-invent the wheel, the Google one is used because it's free and works very well. Contents last updated: 23th May 2011