bk2site

Now any yahoo can be a Yahoo!

Description

bk2site will transform your Netscape bookmarks file into a yahoo-like website with slashdot-like news. You can see an example website created with it at www.MultiAgent.com. The site is generated every hour from a cron job. My goal is to enable the user to establish zero-maintenance high-value (small) websites. I am now using all the information in the bookmarks file, as well as some simple recommender system techniques.

The program has several nice features:

Includes hit-counter and display feature (see which URLs are popular).
Includes integrated cgi-bin search.pl program.
Nice-looking output.
Powerful customization.
Inserts navigation information into the top of each page.
Puts a "new" icon next to new entries.
Supports any other icon(s) (e.g., cool.gif, hot.gif) you might want to show.
Puts New Additions on the front page.
Puts News Items on the front page.
Supports URL and directory aliases.
Use PRIVATE keyword to keep some URLs/folders from appearing.
You can use it to automatically generate almost any sort of structured text file, such as an RSS channel, an email newsletter, etc.
It can also download (http) other people's channels (RSS files) and display their contents in the generated web pages.
Runs on Linux, but some people claim to have compiled it for other Unices (it uses autoconf).

If you want more information, you can read the current manual page, and the example .bk2siterc.

Download

You can get the latest source in RPM, .tar.gz, and binary RPMs from the bk2site sourceforge page. A debian package is also available. Some of the older releases are available. The program seems to work reliably. It was mostly written by Jose Vidal, and is released under the GNU GPL.

The program is written in C++.

You can also get the indexbase.html, otherbase.html, newbase.html, tophitsbase.html, and mynetscapebase.rdf that I use to create multiagent.com. I also generate a weekly newsletter, with this base file. If you feel like donating your "base" files, I would like to post them here.

Forum, Mailing List, Getting Help, and Helping out

Please visit the bk2site sourceforge page.

Acknowledgments

bk2site was developed by José M. Vidal. The following individuals have provided patches and other help. They are also in the AUTHORS file of the distribution.

Chris Siems - help fixing search.pl bugs.
August Hoerandl - wrote check-meta.pl.
Bradley Bell - patch to support multiuser setups.
Daniel Barrero - patch for handling flat file systems
Reinier Mostert - patch to handle bookmark aliases.
Oliver Obst - provided the autoconf scripts.
Hannes Faestermann - patch for new.html
David Cancel - cool ideas and code for improving search.pl

Changes

See the ChangeLog.

This page was last modified on Wed Nov 5 10:14:22 2003