Why Use Templeton?

1. to copy HTML documents and images for use off-line
2. to increase speed and reliability for accessing static web pages.

Who should use Templeton?

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 of 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, 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 expecially disadvantaged as the server he required was down and he wasn't very good at talking without the web page's graphics. I have seen similar disastorous web-based presentations at a library conference in 1996, and at a few computer conferences.

  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 access 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!
• Which Server Is Which? Working for a large computer installation, we have many dozens of 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 effected 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. Sometime 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.