| Contents: | Introduction | Multiselecting Text |
| Configuring Web Searches | Performing Web Searches | |
| Interfacing to Other Software | Summary |
| Tutorial 16: Web Interface | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|
| Connecting NewsRog to Search Engines |
NewsRog has the ability to automatically interface with web based search
engines to allow you to easily perform searches for information you see in
usenet articles. An example will make this more clear. Suppose you read an article in the group sci.space.news with the following text:
Perhaps you are interested in finding out more about NASA's Space Shuttle mission to deploy the Chandra satellite, but there are no URLs contained in the article. You may multi-select several short words or phrases, and then use a pop-up menu to automatically send these to your favorite web search engine, such as Yahoo or Altavista. You do not have to actually enter any text into the web based search engine; NewsRog can automatically generate and submit a query for you - you just see the results! In this case, if you use the Yahoo search engine, you will a link for the "STS-93: Chandra X-Ray Observatory Deployment Mission" web page. For more information on how to set up and use this feature, read the following sections in this tutorial. |
| Multi Selecting Text |
To select multiple words or phrases in an article body, hold down either
alt key while selecting text. The text you select this way will be added
to any other currently selected text, and will remain hilighted even if
you have the AutoClip setting
enabled. An easy way to multiselect several words is to alt-doubleclick on them. You may also alt-doubleclick and drag over several words to select a short phrase. You can see the results of multiselecting text in the section above. |
| Predefined Queries |
By default, NewsRog has no predefined web queries loaded, but several are
supplied with NewsRog that you can load and use in your own NewsRog
projects. You may also define your own. There is a small amount of setup necessary to tell NewsRog how to properly interface with your web browser. Follow these steps to load and configure the pre-defined web based queries:
|
| Using Web Queries |
To use the interface to web based search engines, just select some text in
an article body as described above. Now press the
right mouse button over the article text, and you will see a popup menu
containing the multimedia actions you have loaded or defined. Select
one, and NewsRog will automatically formulate a query for that search
engine using the text you have selected, open your web browser, and
display the results of your query! If you multi-select two adjacent words separately, then a search will be submitted that requires both words to be present, but not necessariliy next to each other. If you select both words together in NewsRog as one unit, then query will require the words to appear together in the search results. For example, selecting "Space" and "Shuttle" separately might return a match on "The Shuttle is a reusable platform for routine access to space...", while if you select the phrase "Space Shuttle" as a unit, then those two words must appear together. The exact manner in which the search is performed depends on the web search engine you chose. |
| Other Uses |
You may also use this feature to interface NewsRog to other applications
such as spell checkers or language translation tools. Any short word or
phrase may be passed to another application this way. Selected text has
the multimedia type application/X-Text, so any multimedia action
can be defined on this type. You may use the NewsRog variable ${SelTxt} to return the currently selected text. There are several optional parameters to control how the text is returned; please see the variable reference documentation for more information. |
| Summary |
By this point in the tutorial you should understand:
|