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:: Plucky Documentation ::
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General Operation
Plucky's main window shows a list of sites and a list of headlines. Click "Refresh" while connected to the Internet and Plucky will check your sites to see if they have new articles available.
Double-click a headline title to open that article in your web browser of choice. Consult the Internet Control Panel (or Internet Config in MacOS Classic) to set your preferred browser. Once you have double-clicked, the site will no longer be bolded since it is assumed that you have read the article. You can also use the delete (or back-delete) key to unbold a selected headline. If no headlines are selected, the delete key will unbold all headlines listed in the headline pane.
You can also double click the name of a site to open that site's address in the browser. This will often link to an XML file, so the information may not be immediately useful to you.
Click the name of a site once to show only the articles from that site.
All these functions are also available from the keyboard. Use the arrow keys and tab or shift-tab to move between the elements of the window.
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Dock Icon
The Dock icon kindly displays the number of new, unread items. The red circle turns blue when Plucky is actually fetching new articles.
You can choose to have the number shown small (as seen here) or in a larger oval that fills the whole icon (look under Preferences->Appearance).
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Dock Menu
Control-clicking on the dock icon gives you a menu showing unread articles. Clicking on one of these articles will open that article in your browser.
You can do this from any application. In other words, you might be using another program such as Text Edit, yet you can still control-click on Plucky's dock icon and see the list of unread articles.
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Descriptions
Some sites provide a small article summary along with the title. This is displayed in a small preview space at the bottom of the window. Two sites that have this feature are the BBC and the Chicago Sun-Times.
If there is no summary available, the full title will be shown here.
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Text Filter
You can reduce the number of headlines shown by typing some text into the area marked "Filter". The picture below shows a filter of "cana" which eliminates all headlines that do not contain those letters in succession. The result shown is a list of articles about the Canadian figure skating team.
If you would like to see only those headlines with the full word "Canada", enter "canada ". The space on the end ensures that only the whole word "Canada" will match the filter. The filter ignores case, so "Canada" is treated the same as "canada".
Remember that the filter is always applied, so if you want to see all articles, delete any text that may be in the filter box.
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Preferences
Thanks to many beta-testers, Plucky has a full set of preferences. You can specify the font size, whether or not read articles are shown in bold, whether or not they are shown at all, how many headlines to save, and many other options.
Most are explained in the Preferences window, but one that is not is the "Output" feature. If you check "Save as HTML", all unread headlines will be written to an HTML file called "HeadlineList.html" in the Reference folder. The items will be separated by site and will be listed as headlines with links to the corresponding article. If you have chosen "Show updated time" then the time will also be shown by the headline. You can post this file to your website or use it in your web browser. The HTML file is generated when you quit the program.
You can specify some HTML to appear before and after the headlines. This can be specified by typing into the "Header" and "Footer" boxes, or by making a file called "Header.html" and "Footer.html" in the Reference folder. (Sample files with a simple stylesheet are provided.) If you need more customized output, consider parsing the HeadlineList.phf file with Perl or some other scripting language.
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Sites
One of the best things about Plucky is the fact that you can choose which sites it visits. To add a new site to Plucky's update list, simply check its checkbox in the Sources window. Uncheck a box to delist a site. The corresponding headlines will be added the next time you hit "Refresh", or deleted the next time you quit the program.
If you want to add a site from a site pack, put that site's XML file into the "Sites" folder inside the "Reference" folder. The next time you open the Sites window, the site will be shown there and you can check it. You can remove a site by clicking the "Delete" button.
After downloading a site pack you will have over 4,000 sites to choose from, but you need not visit them all each time. The "Update" option instructs Plucky to visit a site every time you hit "Refresh", or to only visit once a day. If you know that a site updates infrequently, use this option.
You can also change the number of headlines that are saved for each site. Saving headlines is important because Plucky uses old headlines to decide whether or not a particular headine is new. Choosing "Default" will save as many headlines as you specified in Preferences->Efficiency. Choosing another number will override that value and can help to keep old headlines from showing up again.
After making any change, you must hit the "Change" button to save the changes. (It will say "Add" if you are making a new bookmark.)
For advanced users, you can create new sites within Plucky. A few pattern-matching presets are included, although the most useful way to add a site is to use the URL of a site that publishes in RSS or RDF format. RSS is an XML format that lets sites announce their headlines. If a URL contains RSS information, it will automatically be recognized by Plucky no matter what is in the RegEx and Fields boxes.
Otherwise, Plucky looks for a regular expression with parentheses around the information you want to capture. "Fields" is a corresponding colon-delimited list of one or more of the following: "URL", "Title", "Description", "Extra".
The first three are self-explanatory, but the fourth identifies additional text that should be added on to the title. This is useful for sites with brief descriptions that are 20 characters or fewer. See any existing bookmark for more on how to use these features. Consult your local bookstore for more information on regular expressions.
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