Plucker Quick Start Guide

Here are the basic steps on a Windows PC. I know nothing about Mac or Linux. Those versions may be different. If you have experience using Plucker in these environments please feel free to send your comments.  Also, there is a very good help file included as part of the setup.  Use it to fill in the missing links from this quick start guide.  It’s how I figured out most of this stuff.

Download and Install

1 – Go to http://www.plkr.com
2 – Click Download in the User menu on the left side.
3 – Scroll down to Plucker 1.1.13 and download one of the versions labeled Windows ME/NT/98/95 version (one is downloadable from plkr.com and the other is offsite) by clicking the tiny shopping cart icon next to it.
4 – Unzip the .zip file.
5 – Install the program by executing Plucker-1.1.13.exe and accepting all the defaults.

Setup and Load to Palm

The Plucker install with create a program group in your start menu called Plucker. Within that there is a sub folder called DB ‘Default’.
1 – In the DB ‘Default’ folder double click the Setup icon. A file called plucker.ini will open in Notepad.
2 – In the line that starts “user = ” replace the text “Your Name” with the HotSync name on your Palm. The rest of the plucker.ini file is heavily commented. You can keep the defaults for most of it. Some setting worthy of noting:
maxdepth – this allows you to set how deep Plucker will go in retrieving your web pages.
stayonhost – this tells Plucker whether or not it should get pages that are found on a different site then the homepage you set.

noimages – this tells Plucker whether or not it should get images for the websites it retrieves.
These settings will have a direct affect on the file size of your Plucker database.  (Keep in mind that the larger the database the longer it will take to Hotsync.)
3 – Close this file and save your changes when done.
4 – In the DB ‘Default’ folder double click the Edit icon. A file called home.html will open in Notepad. This will be the Plucker equivalent to the AvantGo My Channels page. This file lists all the web pages you want to download as the Plucker equivalent of channels. You can add or delete web pages/sites you want to download with Plucker from here. Basic knowledge of HTML will come in handy here as each reference needs to be formatted as a web page link (A HREF). You can also change the maxdepth setting for a given channel from here. This DB ‘Default’ example shows you how these links should be formatted.
5 – Save your changes and close this file when done. You can view this file in your web browser on your PC by double clicking the View shortcut.

6 – When you’re satisfied with what your web looks like double click the Hotsync icon. This will launch the application that pulls your channels from the web, converts them to .pdb format and loads them into the Palm Install tool. This may take a few minutes to run if you have a lot of pages to download.
7 – HotSync your Palm.
8 – Launch Plucker on your Palm and click the Folder icon on the top left. If you did everything right then you will see a selection in the next screen called default. This is what you were just editing on your PC.

Update

Unfortunately Plucker does not do automatic updates so you will need to manually update the Default DB every time you want to refresh the content.  To do this just double click the Hotsync icon as in step 6 of the Setup and Load to Palm section above.  This will re-download the content of your channels and set them up to install. Then HotSync and your updated.  If you want to save a little time copy the Hotsync shortcut to your Desktop.

Now if only someone would create a graphic user interface front end for this then we could all use it just as easily as the earlier versions of AvantGo. (Anyone here remember the early versions of AvantGo when you needed to download channel content before HotSyncing it to your Palm? This is the same model.)