|
|
 |
        |
 |
 |
|
Overview of Options Available The Options dialog is the main place where PaqRat's features can be customized for the ways that you personally surf and collect pictures and binaries. We have tried to include most features that someone would want with this sort of program, so let us know if you have a bright idea for another option to offer.
Extensions This section of the options is where the user (you) can specify the types of files you want PaqRat to process. Files which have extensions that are not on these lists will be skipped over. The HTML Files field allows you to specify the file extensions you want to download and parse for new links. This is how PaqRat distinguishes between binary files and HTML files. Normally this doesn't change very often, but if you hit a website with a new type of extension you can add it to the list. The Binary Files field allows you to specify the types of binary files you are interested in downloading. This is another field that probably won't change very often, but there may be times when you may want to take out the picture and movie extensions or add in the mp3 extensions depending on what you are doing at the time. Website Bounds Checking Websites have so many links to other pages and files that if PaqRat followed all the links, it would end up trying to download the entire Internet instead of focusing on the pages you care about from the site you want. So PaqRat has to have a way of telling if a link is a part of the current website or if a link is a "foreign" link to another website that is not a part of this website. PaqRat has two main ways of determining this: Fetch Entire Domain Normally tells PaqRat that under normal circumstances it should view any link to a URL with the same domain name as a good link, but if the link has a different domain name it should be treated as foreign and skipped. This is the broadest interpretation and works well in most cases. The Exceptions button allows you to maintain a list of domains which this should not be followed, however. Domains like www.geocities.com have millions of websites all listed under that domain. If geocities is on the list of exceptions, PaqRat will also use the subdirectories of the URL instead of just the domain to guess whether the link is part of the same site or not. Only Fetch Subdirectories of URL is a more restrictive interpretation of when a link is foreign. For a link to be considered a part of the current Fetch task, it must be in the same directory as the original URL or in a subdirectory under it. This works well most of the time. It is designed to handle directory-oriented sites like geocities, as well as most celebrity sites--which normally have each celebrity in her/his own subdirectory. If you use the "Fetch Entire Domain" option on a typical celeb site, you won't just get the celebrity you are looking for but instead you will get their entire site with ALL the celebs. Other Here are a couple of other options related to how PaqRat loads files. Auto-Trace Webring allows you to instruct PaqRat to follow Webring links that it sees, and make those domains also allowable. Many websites are members of lots of different rings, so again to avoid trying to spider a thousand websites, PaqRat asks you to enter the name of the ring to follow. Webring URLs all have a parameter such as "ring=RaquelWelch" somewhere in them. This is what PaqRat looks for to determine whether to follow the ring or not. Webring sites found this way are added to the queue of sites to go after. When PaqRat runs out of URLs to use in the current list, it adds the next Webring site from the queue and continues to download, repeating this process until there are no more sites in the queue either. Ask for passwords on member sites allows the user to specify whether PaqRat should pop up a login box when websites request it. If you are a member of a site, you should make sure this box is checked, so that PaqRat can ask you for the password and fetch the membership portion of the site. If you are not a member of any sites, you should leave this option turned off so that Fetching is not interrupted all the time by PaqRat asking you for passwords you don't have.
Where to Save The Save Location field is where you are required to enter in a root directory for all pictures and binaries being saved. Other options extend this to provide more functionality. Be sure you have a LOT of disk on whatever drive you specify. The Browse... button will allow you to pick the directory with your mouse instead of trying to remember how to type it in. The next two options are designed to help you accommodate and organize the thousands of files you will soon be getting using PaqRat. Many websites name their files the same way (1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc.), so you need a mechanism to keep them straight. Domain as Subdirectory will add subdirectories under your Save Location for each new domain that PaqRat hits. Because of hosting companies like Geocities, "Domain" in PaqRat is actually the web domain plus the subdirectories down to the homepage. For example, in the screenshot above, the Save Location is specified as "C:\Keith\babes". This means that if I download a file called "whatever.mp3" from www.mp3.com, it will be saved to "C:\Keith\babes\www.mp3.com\whatever.mp3". Mirror Website Subdirectories will add more subdirectories under your Save Location (and domain, if you checked that box) wherever there are subdirectories on the website. This is to help with sites who have multiple collections stored as "1.jpg", "2.jpg" in different directories. For example, if www.models.com has a directory called "Giselle", then PaqRat will save all the pictures of her to "D:\Keith\babes\www.models.com\Giselle\1.jpg" and so on. Size Filtering The Image Size fields (Width, Height and KB) allow you to attempt to filter out banner ads, thumbnails, button gifs, etc. from being saved to your machine. These filters don't prevent them from being downloaded--PaqRat has to load them to see how big they are anyway. It will keep them from saving though. In the main list of URLs, these files will show up as "File too small to be saved" in the Status column. Recurse Local Subdirectories is used when spidering your local hard drive. You can enter a directory path and view all the sounds or pictures in it by prefixing the URL with "file:" instead of "http://" (this is intended to be used for Slideshows primarily). When you hit Fetch, PaqRat will make entries in its list for every file with an allowable extension in that directory. This checkbox is used to determine whether subdirectories should also be added automatically or not.
Slideshow Settings PaqRat uses Slideshows to display pictures automatically, on a timed sequence, so that you can see your favorite pictures without a lot of scrolling and clicking. Slideshows can be played while downloading is going on, and images can be added to or removed from a Slideshow while the show is in progress. The Time Between Pics field is where you specify the number of seconds to wait before displaying each picture. While you are able to change this number while a slideshow is going on, it will not take effect until you have stopped and restarted the slideshow. Add pics to slideshow when loaded tells PaqRat to automatically add every picture to the slideshow as they are loaded from the Web. If you want the slideshow to have every picture, this is the easiest way to do it. If this box is not checked, you must select the ones you want from the URL list and add them to the Slideshow yourself. Randomize Sequence in Slideshow tells PaqRat to display a random picture each time during the slideshow instead of displaying the next one in the sequence of the URL list.
PaqRating™ is potentially our most exciting feature. With it, everyone using PaqRat collaborates to create a database of URLs, each categorized and rated 1-10. Click here for an explanation. Confirm Site Fetching tells PaqRat whether you want a message box confirming with you that you want to fetch after PaqRat knows what the PaqRating is for the website you are about to go after. "Always" indicates that PaqRat should always show you this box and allow you to click Yes or No. "Rated Worse Than" instructs PaqRat to confirm with you only if the PaqRating for the site is less than the score specified. For example, if you specify to confirm only when Rated Worse Than 6, a website with a PaqRating of 5.7 will trigger a confirmation while a website with a PaqRating of 6.1 will not. Get Site PaqRating tells PaqRat how often you are willing to be polled about what you thought of the website you just downloaded. "Always" indicates that you will always give a score. "1 in [4] chance" indicates that PaqRat should randomly ask you after websites 25% of the time. You can set this number as high as 10, but you cannot turn it off. The rating is one mouse click and takes less than a second, so we are really trying to build up our database initially for the good of all PaqRat users around the world. Think about it... a database of thousands of websites, categorized and and searchable like Yahoo... only this time, you know which ones are the "good" ones.
Usability Try to display images/play sounds allows you essentially to turn off the window on the right, so that images and sounds which are downloaded do not show up or get played. (Think of this checkbox as "Office Mode".) If you click on an image, it will be displayed, but PaqRat will not display images as it is Fetching. Shrink images to fit window if necessary instructs PaqRat to shrink images which are too big for the display window so that the entire image fits in the window. Normally, images are shown at full size and can be scrolled to see parts which are too big to display at once. Shrinking occasionally does have some effect on the quality of the image shown.. Shrinking has NO effect on the image saved to the disk--it is only a display feature. Check for duplicates during Fetch tells PaqRat to keep track in real-time of the contents of files it downloads or displays. This is very useful if you fetch more than one site in a row that has the same subject matter. The downside is that it takes a lot of memory (about 4KB per image) so if you are downloading large lists it is better to turn this option off and check for duplicates separately. Recurse Local Subdirectories on Browse affects the Browse Directory command under the Sorting menu. If this box is checked, PaqRat will build a list of all the files in that directory plus all the files in all the subdirectories under that directory. If it is not checked, PaqRat will build the list just from the files in that directory and will ignore subdirectories. Use Recycle Bin when files are deleted instructs PaqRat to delete files to the Recycle Bin. This is good because it gives you an "Undo" capability if you delete the wrong file accidentally. On the other hand, leaving the box unchecked deletes the file all the way, but works much faster. Use text on toolbar buttons affects how PaqRat creates its toolbar. If you want words explaining each button underneath the pictures, check this box. If you already know what all the buttons do, leave it unchecked and you will have more space in your window for pictures. Either way, if you leave your mouse over a toolbar button, you will see a tooltip explaining in more detail what the button does. URL List Don't show irrelevant URLs will make the URL list shorter by leaving out links which do not have the right extensions or are in foreign domains. This works very well on sites which do not span multiple domains, but with sites that cross domains their links will not show up and you will not have enough data to figure out what happened. It is suggested you only use this option on very large sites. Hide non-image URLs after loading will make the URL list shorter by deleting links which are not images after they are downloaded. Thus a site can be fetched in its entirety, and at the end the URL list will only contain a list of the images which were successfully downloaded from the site. This again works very well on "normal" sites, but if a site has something unexpected on it or has a lot of errors or something, you will never know because those entries and errors messages will have been erased. It is suggested you only use this option on very large sites.
|
|
|
