Why Use Templeton?
The main purposes for using Templeton are:
- copying HTML documents and images for use off-line
- increasing speed and reliability when accessing static web pages
- automating web-related tasks
Templeton has been specifically designed to run interactively, or from
an automated script for unmanned document retrieval.
Let me first ask a few questions.
If you answer "YES" to any these questions, then Templeton is for you.
Because Templeton essentially takes a "snapshot" of a web site, it's not useful
for dynamically changing web pages such as current news or weather. But, since
many web pages are static or slowly updated, such as technical reports,
FAQ's, and most home pages, Templeton becomes ideal for bringing the
web information to a local, more convenient location.
The benefits from Templeton come from automating manual tasks and
reducing document latency due to network delays.
A few personal experiences will illustrate many wonderful uses for
Templeton:
- The Costly Call. The vast majority of dial-in access people
pay an internet service provider (ISP) for use. Most people pay at
per-minute rates. Every minute they are sitting is costing them money.
Even worse, my local telephone company also
charges me a minimum of 5 cents per call!
When there is a static web site that I
think I will access often, I use Templeton to bring it to my local machine,
allowing me to view the information for free and at my leisure.
This is different from caching the information through a web browser such as
Netscape, WebExplorer, or Mosaic. Web browsers remove old
items from the cache, making many sites unviewable unless I am connected to
the internet. Furthermore, if you run multiple web browsers (e.g. Netscape and Internet Explorer), the
information stored in one browser's cache is unavailable to other browsers.
- The Lost Server. I met a faculty member once who would download
entire FTP sites. We all would joke about the bandwidth and wasted disk space,
but he had a good reason -- too many times he had found a useful FTP site but
when he returned to it later, the data had changed, vanished, or the remote server
was down. Taking a local snapshot allowed him to go through all the information
at his leisure. Templeton does the same thing for the web; it takes a
snapshot of the available information for you to view at a later time.
- The Bad Presentation. A computer-human interaction course
(CHI) in graduate school required final presentations, many of which
included web pages. Unfortunately, the web server was running slow, making
the presentations look poor. One student was especially disadvantaged because the
server he required was down and he wasn't very good at talking
without the web page's graphics. I have seen similar disastrous web-based
presentations at a library conference in 1996, and at a few computer
conferences (including COMDEX).
If these people had used Templeton to bring the web information to a local
hard disk, the presentations would be dependable and fast (as fast as the hard
drive!) instead of slow and unreliable.
- The Missing Link. A friend of mine manages a large web server.
With thousands of documents available, it is important for him to know how
easily a particular web page is to accessed from the main web page. Using
Templeton, he was able to map his entire web site and see how difficult it was
to find certain web pages. Moreover, he found that some pages were not
accessible by following links from his main page!
- The Bad Link. I was recently put on a project and told to
check all the HTML code for bad links. There were hundreds of links.
I am told that my predecessor did this by hand over a few days.
Templeton did this automatically over a few minutes, rapidly identifying
all broken links with its LinkChecking feature.
- Which Server Is Which? Working for a large computer company,
we have many machines running various web servers. A very dangerous
security flaw was identified in one particular server type. Using Templeton's
server identification feature, we quickly determined which machines were
affected by this bug and were able to patch the systems.
- The Automated List. I know we all hate to think about this, but
hundreds of people out there want to put you on their mailing list. I have
been approached by some of these people and, through various pressures, have
added a feature that generates an e-mail mailing list from the addresses found
in web pages. I apologize to all.
- The Text Editor. I watched our web master import HTML documents
into WordPerfect. She kept doing the same commands: save the document,
run the html2txt command which removed the HTML tags, then import the document. Sometimes she would
just load the HTML document into the word processor and spend a few minutes
deleting the HTML tags. Although Templeton
could not speed up WordPerfect, it was able to retrieve all the HTML
documents and automatically run html2txt, simplifying the entire process.
With the Command_html feature, Templeton can even execute a script which
runs html2txt and concatinates all the plain text into one large file.
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Document revision: 20 December 1998 for Templeton 3.000
Copyright 1996-1998 N.A. Krawetz
Modification, republication, and redistribution of this
document is strictly prohibited. All rights reserved.