Offline usage of web resources and tools
Since more and more people are coming to look at my house to (hopefully) eventually buy it, I have to figure out some strategy to view the stuff I regularly need offline. I am not talking about offline viewing in a webbrowser, but really retrieving everything (interesting) from a site to a local resource in a simple way for later viewing. This needs to be flexible in a couple of ways :
- I want to use linux as my server for the data access
- I have a portable which must retrieve the data when there is an internet connection. The retrieval however should not progress without me knowing, but based on a profile that will retrieve the things I can afford at that time (eg persoanl mail when I have a mobile phone connection to the internet and eg resource updating when I have some bandwith at my disposal, or when low bandwith an aggregation (eg RSS) of what changes can be found.
My idea so far is that I need a server on the internet (need that anyway), that will cache everything I need, so I just need to go to one source to retrieve my stuff.
As an example : I am going to need to full website of jakarta.apache.org (forgetting the cvs option here, which is more obvious in my case) and want to
to know what the changes are when I am on low bandwith and retrieve the changes when my bandwith is sufficient to be able to retrieve the changes.
If jakarta would have an rss of the changes, it would be easy, to just get the rss and give feedback from that to keep up-to-date. If however jakarta hasn't got a rss feed, my little internet server should generate one based on the changes he encounters on the server.
Client Issues
On the client side I don't need much, since I am a geek and have enough equipment to have me a server running, however when I am sailing on the atlantic (with a power aggregator), it would be nice to have a client that can handle everything I need for when I get back online in some way (eg mail, updated blogs, commits to public cvs servers, updating of the route I had, preferrably in one zip (ehh tar.gz is even smaller I guess) uploaded to my server, and the server handles the rest (cvs can be problematic though).
Also my client would love to have something as small as possible in return, so he wants tar.gz with all the changes too..
Hmm, going to be interesting effort to solve my little problem here :)
Also it's nice if other folks that are on a long trip can use this kind of stuff
Hope satelite internet can solve this all, but for now I don't assume I have a good worldwide connection using that and it will be a waste of money if it is just usable in Europe (although for 100 Euro a month, it's pretty affordable).
If anyone has any ideas for a nice internet connection which is pretty much worldwide usable, let me know :)
Hmm enough for now, I need to clean my place for some visitors tomorrow :)
Posted by mvdb at January 14, 2003 07:05 PM