WebWagon 1.5 [image] User Manual

As a dial-up user, I wish I can save the homepages onto my hard disk and browse them later off-line. So I save them page after page from my browser and find it painstaking when I am interested in all linked pages. To make this task easier, I wrote this WebWagon program and now I can browse using my browser and download any page of interest with or without its anchored links using WebWagon. WebWagon works hard, sometimes I activate two or more instances of WebWagon to download more pages simultaneously.

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Requirement:

Windows 3.1 or 95

PPP connection to Internet and a Winsock dialer

Files in the package:

WW.EXE  (main program)

WW.HLP  (help file)

Copyright

Instruction

Operation Guide

Tricks

Q&A


Copyright

WebWagon 1.5 is still a freeware. It can be freely distributed so long as its copyright message is not altered and no part of the packaged files is changed. This program is provided as is, support may be given at the authors discretion.

WebWagon for Windows 95 (32bit) will be available soon. If you need customization or the source code, please contact the author by e-mail. Any comments or suggestions are also welcome. Please e-mail to:

TedWen@ChinaPro.net.cn

Author: Ted Wen

Telephone: 0086 10 6736 6957

Address: 5-2-8, Fatou Xili,

    Chaoyang District,

    Beijing, 100023, P.R. China


Instruction

Before running the program, unpack it into a subdirectory such as

C:\WEBWAGON, and then create an icon in any related program group. The icon appears like this:

Definitions

Main Window

Controls on the Window


WebWagon Window


Controls

Controls	Description
URL	Input URL address or local HTML document filename here
	Start/Stop Downloading
	Leave WebWagon and return to Windows
Save Dir:	Sub-directory name where down-loaded documents are to be saved. It is under WebWagons directory by default.
Include linked pages	When its checked, anchored URLs in the current homepage will be collected for separate download.
Include picture files	When this is checked, picture files like GIF,JPG are included
Include external page	Documents linked in from other sites will also be downloaded if this is checked.
	Press this button when no response occurs for a long time possibly because of URL mistake or connection error.
	URLs queued in the list box on the right are collected from the downloaded pages. They will be downloaded one by one if not marked as ignore by selecting it and pressing this button. Press the button again to undo the operation.
	Operation is same as above. affected document will be downloaded but its links will not be followed.
	When its in down state, the program will pause when the current document finishes so that the above two operations can be carried out.
	Open a local HTML document file to download the linked pages in it. This operation will automatically set Include external page to true and Include linked pages to false.
	This icon indicates the document is not downloaded yet.
	This indicates the page is already saved.
	Marked as IGNORE, it will be skipped.
	Marked as NO FOLLOW.
	Picture files not downloaded.


Definitions

Homepage	A document from a WWW site specified by a URL.
Link	A URL address included in a homepage as pointer to another document.
Image	A picture embeded in a HTML document, can be downloaded by WebWagon as a special file.
Site	A place on Internet where the required documents reside.
Download	Copy a document from the remote site to the local hard disk.
Local	Your PC.


Operation Guide

1. Download all linked pages from a given URL

Enter the URL address in the edit box at URL. Rename the sub-directory at Save Dir (new directory will be automatically created). Press Start button.

2. Specify a sub-directory to store downloaded documents

Name a sub-directory to save all downloaded files at one transaction. DOS filename convention is observed except no extension is allowed. The new directory will be created under \WEBWAGON if not existing. Otherwise, files in the sub-directory will be overwritten.

3. Download pictures

On a fast connection line, inline images can be downloaded to obtain a complete HTML document. If no picture is wanted, switch off Includepicture files.

4. Off-line browsing

WebWagon will beep and displays Complete! when all linked pages are downloaded. Now you can hang-up and open the first document in the sub-directory. The first file is named HOME.HTM.

5. Select documents for download

There are usually a lot of anchors pointing to the home or table of contents. If you dont want these pages, you can click [image] to pause continued transmission and select one or more pages for exclusion and then press [image].

6. Download linked pages

Sometimes we have a hotlist file containing many external links, ie., documents from many different sites. Open this hotlist file and switch on Include external page. Then WebWagon will get all homepages (only the first page). Keep in mind that if Include linked pages is on, WebWagon will navigate without knowing where to stop and finally crash when all resources are used up.

7. Dont follow some pages

Some pages include information we dont need. Select these pages and press [image]. These pages will be downloaded but their linked pages are ignored.


Tricks

1. Work with a WWW browser

WebWagon is unable to display a HTML document. We will have to know what a page is about before download by means of a WWW browser such as Netscape or Mosaic. Browsers can work side by side with WebWagon so that we know what to include and where to go.

2. Recognizing a useful page

Among the linked pages in a HTML document, the first and last one or two links can be ignored. We can sort them out by their names.

3. Selecting images

A HTML document includes two types of images, informative or decorative, the former is what we usually need. The filename can mostly tell us if it is informative, e.g., 24FIG10.GIF is a figure.

4. Browsing while downloading

When we find useful documents while browsing, wen can copy the URL to clipboard (Ctrl-C), initiate WebWagon and then paste the URL onto it and start downloading.

5. Downloading more documents simultaneously

We can make use of Windows multi-tasking to download more pages at the same time. While the first document is on transmission, we can run WebWagon again and the new process will fetch another document. Because Internet traffic is much slower than our processor, multiple transmission is efficient.


Q&A

Q. What can I do when Connection takes a long time?

A. This might be caused by invalid URL, remote server or connection error. Simply press [image] to skip this page and go on with the next.

Q. Why are ignore documents still in the queue?

A. WebWagon wont ask for the documents marked as ignore. These links are retained on the queue in case they are included in later pages so that we have to delete them many times.

Q. What if I dont want first link?

A. While the home page is downloading, press pause button and when the links appear in the list box, mark the first page as ignore.

Q. What can I do if interruption occurs while downloading?

A. Dont exit or stop WebWagon, switch to dialer and connect again. WebWagon should go on when connected.