gURLfriend is a utility that will parse your Netscape or Internet Explorer bookmarks files into a format that is more convenient to post on to a web site. Your browser’s bookmark file contains much more information than you would expect. Besides the bookmark’s name and URL, the bookmark file holds information such as the date the bookmark was last visited, the day it was added, and comments you may have added. This extra information almost doubles the size of the bookmarks file and is removed by gURLfriend. The gURLfriend application also searches through your bookmarks list and indexes all the bookmark folder names and creates a table of contents. This table of contents greatly speeds up access to your online bookmarks since you can quickly jump to the folder you are interested in without having to transfer the bookmark information for the URLs you are not interested in.
Your bookmark file would like like this after being parsed by gURLfriend and viewed in a web browser:
==========================
(gURLfriend.html)
Jeff Luszcz’s Bookmarks
Fun
News
Macintosh
(and in separate files)
(gf100.html)
Fun
Dilbert
News of the Weird
(gf101.html)
News
CNN
The Gate
The Nando Times
(gf102.html)
Macintosh
MacIntouch
MacWeek
MacWorld
==========================
So, if you or a visitor to your web site was interested in Macintosh information, they would click on the “Macintosh” link in the table of contents file. The file that contains the Macintosh bookmark information would then be loaded. The user could then click on any of the bookmarks in that folder, or click Back and their browser would bring them
back to the table of contents.
This greatly reduces the amount of information that has to be transmitted for a user to click on a particular bookmark. If you just posted your original browser’s bookmarks file to the web, the user would have to load the entire document for each bookmark they are interested in. Instead having to transfer 10s of kilobytes of information, you only have to transfer a few kilobytes.
How do I use gURLfriend?
gURLfriend is very easy to use. Double click the gURLfriend v2.2 application to start the program. A splash screen will appear. Click OK to dismiss this screen. The main gURLfriend window contains two buttons and two checkboxes. Set the gURLfriend options by setting the checkboxes in this window. The “Put Folders into Separate files” option makes gURLfriend create a new file for each top level folder in your bookmarks file. This greatly reduces download time for users accessing your bookmarks on the web. The next option “Keep comments” preserves the comments in the parsed file. Some people might not want their comments visible and this option allows them to keep them from being shown. If you choose to uncheck the “Put Folders into Separate files” option, a new option will appear. The “Link to Top next to folder names” checkbox allows to control whether a clickable link to the top of the bookmark file appears next to each folder name in the parsed file. It is recommended that you keep the link to the top since it allows your bookmark users to get back to the top without having to click on the BACK browser button which would cause your browser to reload the bookmark file. This takes time. The only reason to uncheck the “Link to Top next to folder names” is aestetics.
Most people will find that the default options work best.
Click on the “Select Bookmark File” button and a file picker will appear. Select the bookmark file you would like to parse. When a bookmarks file has been selected and the options have been set, the user should click on the “Do it” button. A file box will appear allowing you to name the output file for the main gURLfriend document. This is the file you will link to in your home page. By default it is named “gURLfriend.html”. If you are having gURLfriend break the folders into separate files you should create a folder to place gURLfriend’s output files into because gURLfriend will produce a series of files. These files will be a series in the form gfSOMENUMBER.html (i.e. gf100.html ) and each contain a top level folder from your bookmarks file.
gURLfriend has now produced parsed bookmark output which you can now place on to your home page. It will either be a single file or a series of files depending on whether the “Put Folders into Separate files” option was selected or not. You will now place these files on your home page using a ftp tool like Fetch.
You can now link this bookmark file to your home page by using HTML code such as the following:
<A HREF="gURLfriend.html">Bookmarks</A>
OR
<A HREF="./gf/gURLfriend.html">Bookmarks</A>
if you have your gURLfriend bookmarks in a directory on your home page. In this example the bookmark files are in a folder called ‘gf’.
Where is my browsers bookmarks file?
If you are using Netscape, your bookmarks file should be in either a folder named "Netscape f" or under your name in the “Netscape Users” folder, both of which are contained in the Preferences folder in your system folder. The bookmarks file is named "Bookmarks.html"
If you are using Internet Explorer, your favorites file will be in a folder named "Explorer" in the Preferences folder in your System Folder. Your bookmarks file is named "Favorites.html"
You can use the Find File function from the Macintosh Finder to find these files.
Why would I want to use gURLfriend?
If you are like me you put a copy of your bookmarks list on your home page. By using gURLfriend you will significantly decrease the total size of this information and also make it easier to use. My bookmarks file size went from 97K to 56K after running it through gURLfriend. It is also indexed which makes it easier to use. A parsed bookmarks file takes much less time to transfer when posted on your page.
Most importantly, if you break the folders into separate files, the time the is required to access a particular bookmark is significantly reduced. The table of contents file is a fraction of the total size of your bookmark information. Mine for example is 3K.
Also, gURLfriend strips all information except the URL, its name and the comments if you allow them to be kept. All other information is removed which not only reduces the file size, it also removes possibly sensitive information that you might not want posted to the net.
Where can I find updates to this program and other software by the author?
Check out the following URL for software updates:
http://www.best.com/~jluszcz/software.html
gURLfriend is shareware. See the Register program included in this archive for registration information.
Enjoy,
Jeff
Jeff Luszcz
jluszcz@kagi.com
http://www.best.com/~jluszcz/
Release Notes
v2.2 03/11/98 Changed HTML code to handle differences between how Netscape and Internet Explorer display lists. Added jump to top code. Added vers resource.
v2.1 02/23/98 Fixed bug that caused problems due to huge URLs, fixed bug parsing some Internet Explorer files
v2.0 02/16/98 New user interface, ability to preserve comments and split folders into separate files to speed up downloading
v1.02 04/25/97 Increased buffer to handle larger line lengths (now at 499 chars/line)
v1.01 04/21/97 Changed location of CloseDataFork for safety
