Re: agent off-line and URLs

[fdc@cliwe.ping.de (Frank D. Cringle)]

Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk> writes:
> As browse-url muggins if it's useful, I'll implement a browse-url
> function to allow you to snarf URLs offline to a file (presumably).
> You could then set browse-url-browser-function to it as appropriate.
> That's easy.  Is there a good suggestion for a _simple_ way to use the
> results online afterwards?  For instance, just invoking browse-url N
> times in succession (asynchronously) and emptying the file isn't
> right, I think.  [I don't know anything about existing implementations
> of that sort of thing.]

I just drop them into an HTML file and browse that file later when I
am online.  Here is what I have been using since the days when
browse-url-browser-function was called gnus-button-url.  I have been
meaning to clean it up - particularly by inserting new URLs at the
front rather than the end.

;; Should delete whitespace at end of subject line and
;; translate & to &amp;
(defun fdc-note-url (url)
  "Deposit a URL in the user's note.html file.
Bind this function to gnus-button-url if you
prefer not to lookup URLs while reading news."
  (interactive "sURL: ")
  (set-buffer gnus-summary-buffer)
  (let ((group (or (car gnus-article-current) "???"))
	(article (or (cdr gnus-article-current) "???"))
	(subject (or (gnus-summary-article-subject) "???"))
	(buffer (find-file-noselect gnus-note-file)))
    (set-buffer buffer)
    (bury-buffer buffer)
    (if (<= (point-max) 1)		; empty or new file
	(progn
	  (insert "<TITLE>Noted URLs</TITLE>\n")
	  (insert (format "<H1>Extracted from news by %s</H1>\n"
			  (getenv "USER")))))
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (if (search-forward url nil t)
	(message "%s is already in %s." url gnus-note-file)
      (goto-char (point-max))
      (insert (format "<A HREF=\"%s\">%s[%s] %s</A><P>\n"
		      url group article subject))
      (save-buffer)
      (message "%s inserted in %s." url gnus-note-file))))

-- 
Frank Cringle,      fdc@cliwe.ping.de
voice: (+49 2304) 467101; fax: 943357