FTP options
The options dialog is used to define the default options associated with new site definitions. This makes it easier to add new sites because you do not need to keep setting or resetting options which are based on your personal favourites or which are affected by your environment.
Anonymous e-mail password
For sites which you connect to using the anonymous user id, you will need to specify a password, typically your e-mail address (although most sites do not and cannot validate this). Use this to personalise your login connections.
Default local directory
Directory where files will be stored when you download them. If this is an absolute directory then files will be stored in a sub-directory based on the sites name and the directory where the file is found. If the default local directory is relative, then the downloaded files will be stored in a sub-directory relative to the current working directory.
Download mode
This option is used to determine the action when you double click a file to download it.
Download and open file
If this option is enabled then after the file has been downloaded, the file will be opened automatically, rather than waiting for an acknowledgement from you in the progress dialog. This is ideal for a local link (fast) network connection.
Download only
When a download is completed, wait for user action in the progress dialog box to determine whether to open the file or not.
General options
Enable LIST -a:
Normally CRiSP will use the “LIST -a” command to show the files in a directory. Some FTP servers do not respond to this and will generate an error. CRiSP tries to automatically detect which server is being connected to, but if it gets it wrong then you will not be able to successfully navigate. In this case, try disabling this option.
Enable debug Enables tracing of the FTP conversation. Debug is placed in a buffer, called ftpdebug.log, which you can analyse to ensure correct operation. Additional debug can be found in the crisp.log trace file if the CRiSP debug command is enabled although this is much more detailed.
Enable proxy
Specifies whether to enable use of the currently selected proxy server. You can set this option to enabled for all sites, and then globally disable it by using the FTP Proxy dialog and clearing the current proxy server. This makes it simple to switch from a work to a home environment without needing to manually reset each site you wish to contact.
Follow links When a directory listing is displayed for a Unix system, symbolic links are usually displayed in the format:
file -> real-filename
If this option is enabled and you double click on the file then CRiSP will attempt to change directory to the specified path. If it is not enabled then CRiSP will try to download the specified file. The FTP protocol does not provide sufficient information to enable the local application to determine if the displayed file is actually a file or a directory. In any case you can use the context menu (right mouse click) to select the Change Directory or Download option if CRiSP selects the wrong option.
CWD Keepalive
Used with Maintain Connection to use a different method to keep the connection open by changing to the current working directory.
DIR Keepalive
Used with Maintain Connection to use a different method to keep the connection open by changing doing periodic LIST commands on the remote host. Some FTP servers will detect NOOP or CWD keepalives and this can be used to work around this feature..
Maintain connection
Many FTP servers will drop the connection if it has been idle for 10 minutes or more. This can be an inconvenience if you have selected a site and then switch to doing something else before downloading a file, for instance. Enabling this option will attempt to keep the connection open when no data transfer is taking place. Some sites do not like this from a security point of view and this may not work. In this case, try enabling the CWD Keepalive or DIR Keepalive options to try an alternate mechanism of keeping the remote end happy. DIR keepalives take precedence over CWD keepalives if both are set.
Passive
Specifies whether passive connections are used on the data channel. This may be needed when going through a firewall or a NAT router (Network address translation). This option lets you set the passive mode irrespective of the setting on any proxy server.
Upload files on save
Specifies the action to perform when you save a file which had previously been downloaded from an FTP site.
Every time means to automatically upload the changed file. Prompt is used to display a dialog box giving you the option to upload the file or not. None means not to upload the file, in which case you will need to manually upload the file.
Pause on completion controls what happens after a file has been uploaded. If enabled, then the progress dialog will persist, giving you time to read the statistics. Click on OK in the progress dialog to dismiss it and continue editing. If disabled, then as soon as the upload is finished, the progress dialog will disappear. Pause on completion may be useful when transferring over a slow link, e.g. over the internet. Disabling the option is more suitable for a reliable fast local network.
On autosave can be used if you have the autowrite autosave feature enabled. If both options are set then the remote file will be updated when the autosave is made.
Upload filename translation
Specifies how to translate filenames when files are uploaded (saved). Some operating systems or networking environments may not preserve the case of letters in a filename which can cause ambiguities when uploaded files (e.g. the file might start out as file.txt but be saved as FILE.TXT, causing two files on the remote site). Microsoft Windows does not normally allow this but Unix does and hence saving files between these two systems might lead to problems.
Use this option to force filenames to take on a particular case, e.g. all lower case, upper case, or no translation, as appropriate.
Other
The Timeout parameter controls how long to wait for a response from the remote server before aborting the current operation. The default is 30 seconds which should be more than enough unless the remote server is very busy. If you are suffering abnormal I/O operation timeouts, then it may be worth increasing the value.
Note that if the various keepalive options are enabled, CRiSP will use a default internal value of 60 seconds to ensure the connection stays alive.
The TCP Port field defines the default port to connect on to remote servers. It is not normally necessary to change this value unless you are talking to non-standard sites.
Site properties
The site properties dialog is used to add a new FTP or SFTP definitions. A number of settings are required to define a site, the bare minimum being the hostname and login information for the site. Other attributes may be based on personal preferences as appropriate.
There are two pages of settings – the first set is used for setting the main connection options, and the second is used for setting the options for an SFTP (FTP over SSL) connection.
Site name
Use this field to give a short descriptive name to your site.
Host name
Name of the site to contact or an IP address.
TCP Port
TCP port to connect on. The default value for the TCP protocol is 23.
Username and Password
Information needed for logging in. If you are not using an anonymous login, then you will need to specify a password. CRiSP stores passwords in an encrypted format, but this is not secure and you cannot rely on this to hide your passwords from snoopers. If you work in a sensitive environment then consider not specifying passwords but rely on being prompted for one instead or disable the Save password option.
Anonymous login
If selected, the username and password fields will be updated to reflect an anonymous login.
Save password
Specifies whether the password for this site is to be stored in the ftp.ini file. In a secure environment it is best not to store passwords even although they are encrypted as anyone who can access your ftp.ini file may be able to crack the encryption mechanism used. The encryption mechanism is designed to stop casual snoopers rather than determined hackers.
Transfer as
Specifies the default mode for file transfer. The two options are Binary and Text. Binary is usually the preferred option as it means that when a file is transferred an exact byte for byte copy of the file is created. If you transfer files in text mode then you may find that lines which previously ended in a single newline character will have a carriage return added before the newline. For text files this may not be an issue but for pure binary files (such as executables), it will result in file corruption.
SSH-SFTP support
This page of settings is used to set options specific to the SFTP protocol. The secure connection protocol utilises the SSL secure sockets layer to make a connection to a remote host, using the same technology as ssh or scp.
The SSL protocol encompasses a number of encryption algorithms and options, most of which can be defaulted for a connection. You may need to tweak the settings depending on the SSL server you are connecting to.
The following options are available.
Remote command
When using the SFTP protocol, the client end, e.g. CRiSP, needs to tell the remote end what command to execute to provide the FTP file transfer services. CRiSP contains a built in default command for launching the server in the traditional location. Some systems may install SSH services in a non-standard location, so you may need to set this to the full path on the remote end of the server. The default is to try /usr/lib/sftp-server or /usr/local/lib/sftp-server
Protocol options
Enable compression
If set then file transfers will be done using compression. This can significantly speed up transfers, especially as the files you edit will typically be In text format, rather than binary.
Enable non-standard single-DES
This option controls whether to proffer DES link encryption when using the SSH protocol version 2. DES is considered to be relatively weak compared to the other protocols, and if security is a high concern, then it is best to avoid enabling this.
Enable SSH1 protocol
SSH version 1 is an older version of the SSL protocols and is not necessarily as strong, cryptographically as the current version. Use this only if you need to talk to an older server which does not cater for SSH2.
Immitate SSH 2 MAC bug
(MAC stands for Mandatory Access control and has nothing to do with Ethernet media access control). This option lets you interoperate with certain SSH servers which had a bug in the MAC protocol. Not many of these servers should exist as they should have been upgraded by now, but you may need to set this if you get Incorrect MAC received on packet messages in the FTP debug log.
Protocol algorithms
There are numerous algorithms which are supported on the SSL protocol, some being more cryptographically secure than others, but the trade off being complexity and speed of connection. For example, AES which is based on RSA technology, is very secure but can take use a lot of CPU as the challenge-response protocol is initiated on connection. (For example, measured as about 4 seconds of CPU on 1 1GHz Pentium 3, and up to 50 seconds on a DEC Alpha running at 233 MHz).
The WARN protocol entry is used as a dividing line. Any protocols above the warning line will be tried, in order, depending on the remote end. Protocols below the line (e.g. DES) will be tried but only after warning of a lowering of effective security.
Logging If this option is enabled then SSH protocol level packet dumping is performed. This should only be set if requested in order to debug connection problems with a server.
HTML Support
CRiSP provides extensive support for HTML programming. It is one of the most powerful HTML editors out there. The HTML Toolbar is preconfigured for popular functions. HTML Template Set can be used to insert commonly used HTML tags.
HTML editing sub-menu
The HTML sub menu provides options for applying edits which are useful when manually creating HTML documents.
Convert to Text glyphs
Use this option after selecting a region of text (or the entire buffer if nothing is selected). This will convert the text from HTML format to plain text. This involves converting any HTML character commands into their plain text equivalents, for example < is HTML for ‘<’.
Convert to HTML glyphs
This command is similar to the convert to text option but works in reverse, converting characters which cannot be used literally to their HTML equivalents. This is particularly useful, for example to take a piece of program code and to convert it into HTML reading for viewing in a document. For example, using raw C or C++ code is bound to cause display problems because of the use of characters such as & and <.
Convert text to HTML
This option is similar to the prior but is used to create a pure HTML file out of the current buffer. A new file is created (with a .html extension) and the file is loaded. For example, you can use this to quickly convert a syntax colored file into something immediately viewable from a web browser.
Vhdl Memory
Vhdl Primitives
Vhdl Timing
Newsgroup
WebNews is a facility for monitoring news feeds on the internet whilst you are working. Instead of having to switch from CRiSP to a web browser and then seeing what sites have changed, you can avoid the switch and keep a constant eye on changing news as it happens.
Adding webnews to an editor might seem like a strange thing, but it is actually designed to improve productivity. With webnews, you can actually monitor more news sites and spend less time browsing, because you only see things which change and things of interest to you rather than having to poll sites for updates.
WebNews relies on news sites making available news summary pages (usually in an XML file format known as RSS or RDF files). You do not need to know how it works. There are thousands of sites on the web which provide everything from major news, technical news, weblogs, music news and more. ou can access the following sites from the WebNews facility:
Web sites providing RDF/RSS news feeds.
Google News groups
eBay auction items
The WebNews facility in CRSP is made available as a pane of the Contents window, i.e. it is displayed at the left of the editing area and provides two views – a scrolling tabular view, or a tree view so you can see what each site is doing. WebNews works by polling the remote sites, and each site is configurable in the delay between polls. For example, some sites might only update once a day, others, such as major news feeds may update every 15 minutes or so. You can control the amount of polling, e.g. to reduce network bandwidth and delays in CRiSP whilst downloading and updating news.
Table View
The table view gives you a scrolling list of latest headlines. Every time a site is visited for updates, these are added to the bottom of the view. CRiSP is intelligent enough to filter out headlines which already appear in the table, so you get to see only new news.
This view is probably the ideal view for occasionally monitoring of new items.
CRiSP color codes items so you can easily distinguish news items and the sites they came from. It also date stamps the news, so that for example, when returning to CRiSP in the morning, you can distinguish yesterdays news from todays updates.
Each news item includes a time stamp, and details of the URL to access the item. Double clicking on the item will cause the item to be loaded into your configured browser. (See the WWW Options settings in the Options menu to configure a non-default browser).
The table view supports tooltips – if a news item isn’t completely visible because the headline is too wide to fit in the available space, then hovering the mouse over the item will show a tip with the complete item in it, avoiding having to change the width of the table or having to use the scrollbar to sideways scroll.
CRiSP even includes a Mark Position command so you can underline news you have read, making it easier to distinguish items you have scanned versus new items appearing after your last visual check.
Tree View
The tree view organises incoming news as a tree, sorted by topic and site. You will be able to see all the news for a site. Unlike the table view, you will be able to see all the current news, rather than the incremental changes, making it ideal for scanning by site rather than age of item. Plus you can collapse and expand trees of sites or topics, so you can hide less interesting news.
CRiSP uses color coding within the tree view to attempt to indicate the oldness of entries. By default, entries less than 1 hour old are coded red to indicate news alerts. Older items are colored green – making it much easier to see what has changed recently.
Double clicking on a news item will launch the item into your default browser.
Alerts Views
The alerts view is designed to provide a way to filter down the amount of headlines in order to watch for specific items. With the default sites available in CRiSP you might see 100 headlines or more per hour. If you disappear from your computer for a while and come back you may miss something of interest. The Alerts view lets you do keyword searches on headlines and provides a way to see just those headlines matching specific keywords. For example, you might be interested In news on specific items (“LCD displays”, “US State Governor”, etc). Every time a matching headline appears, it is shown in the Alerts window as well as the main Table view.
You configure the words to search for from the Options dialog.
Multiple Views
Not only do you have a choice of views on the items, but because CRiSP supports multiple contents windows (either as dialogs or as MDI windows), you can simply create a new Contents window to solely display news, without interrupting your preferred project view of files and buffers.
Context Menu
You can access various commands by right clicking on a news item:
Properties
This will popup a dialog showing details of the site and/or news item, including the URL. You can then proceed to make changes.
Pause This will pause further downloads, e.g. to avoid overloading your LAN link or because you are taking a break and don’t want any updates whilst you are away. This item will change to Resume if paused. When pausing, a reminder is added to the bottom of the table view so that you can know you need to re-enable the command.
Options
Pops up the options dialog where you can make various settings changes and edit/view the list of configured sites.
Clear
Clears the table or tree view so you can avoid clutter from older news items.
Mark Position
Used on the table view to add an annotation at the bottom of the table. This is useful when you have a continual stream of news updates and its difficult to remember where you had gotten to when browsing the items.
Collapse all (Tree view only)
Collapses all sites to hide the news. Newly added news items will re-expand the tree making it easier to see what is new and recent.
Kick off
Use this to force the currently selected site to be refreshed from the remote site. Normally CRiSP will wait til the refresh time period has expired. Use this to force an update now. Be careful of doing this too often. Some sites may ban you for a time period if you make too frequent updates from them. Most sites usually don’t update any more often than 30-60 minutes so its normally not necessary to do this.
Refresh all
Causes the timer for each site to be reset, forcing a refresh from the sites immediately.
Enable site
If a site has been disabled (either explicitly by you or due to an HTTP request error).
Help
Displays this help window.
Status
Shows the current internal operation status. Mainly used for debugging of the webnews interface.
View feed
This will load the selected sites web page into CRiSP for viewing. Mainly used for diagnosing parsing errors on pages or to manually look for errors regarding URLs, e.g. pages being redirected.
Many sites seems to publish bogus news URLs. Sometimes viewing the page which was downloaded can help you to identify the real address. Some sites may use dynamically changing URLs, e.g. on a day to day basis. These sites make it difficult to use webnews against. Viewing the downloaded page may help you to identify the reason for the lack of updates for that site.
Categories
WebNews is a facility for monitoring news feeds on the internet whilst you are working. Instead of having to switch from CRiSP to a web browser and then seeing what sites have changed, you can avoid the switch and keep a constant eye on changing news as it happens.
Adding webnews to an editor might seem like a strange thing, but it is actually designed to improve productivity. With webnews, you can actually monitor more news sites and spend less time browsing, because you only see things which change and things of interest to you rather than having to poll sites for updates.
WebNews relies on news sites making available news summary pages (usually in an XML file format known as RSS or RDF files). You do not need to know how it works. There are thousands of sites on the web which provide everything from major news, technical news, weblogs, music news and more. ou can access the following sites from the WebNews facility:
Web sites providing RDF/RSS news feeds.
Google News groups
eBay auction items
The WebNews facility in CRSP is made available as a pane of the Contents window, i.e. it is displayed at the left of the editing area and provides two views – a scrolling tabular view, or a tree view so you can see what each site is doing. WebNews works by polling the remote sites, and each site is configurable in the delay between polls. For example, some sites might only update once a day, others, such as major news feeds may update every 15 minutes or so. You can control the amount of polling, e.g. to reduce network bandwidth and delays in CRiSP whilst downloading and updating news.
Table View
The table view gives you a scrolling list of latest headlines. Every time a site is visited for updates, these are added to the bottom of the view. CRiSP is intelligent enough to filter out headlines which already appear in the table, so you get to see only new news.
This view is probably the ideal view for occasionally monitoring of new items.
CRiSP color codes items so you can easily distinguish news items and the sites they came from. It also date stamps the news, so that for example, when returning to CRiSP in the morning, you can distinguish yesterdays news from todays updates.
Each news item includes a time stamp, and details of the URL to access the item. Double clicking on the item will cause the item to be loaded into your configured browser. (See the WWW Options settings in the Options menu to configure a non-default browser).
The table view supports tooltips – if a news item isn’t completely visible because the headline is too wide to fit in the available space, then hovering the mouse over the item will show a tip with the complete item in it, avoiding having to change the width of the table or having to use the scrollbar to sideways scroll.
CRiSP even includes a Mark Position command so you can underline news you have read, making it easier to distinguish items you have scanned versus new items appearing after your last visual check.
Tree View
The tree view organises incoming news as a tree, sorted by topic and site. You will be able to see all the news for a site. Unlike the table view, you will be able to see all the current news, rather than the incremental changes, making it ideal for scanning by site rather than age of item. Plus you can collapse and expand trees of sites or topics, so you can hide less interesting news.
CRiSP uses color coding within the tree view to attempt to indicate the oldness of entries. By default, entries less than 1 hour old are coded red to indicate news alerts. Older items are colored green – making it much easier to see what has changed recently.
Double clicking on a news item will launch the item into your default browser.
Alerts Views
The alerts view is designed to provide a way to filter down the amount of headlines in order to watch for specific items. With the default sites available in CRiSP you might see 100 headlines or more per hour. If you disappear from your computer for a while and come back you may miss something of interest. The Alerts view lets you do keyword searches on headlines and provides a way to see just those headlines matching specific keywords. For example, you might be interested In news on specific items (“LCD displays”, “US State Governor”, etc). Every time a matching headline appears, it is shown in the Alerts window as well as the main Table view.
You configure the words to search for from the Options dialog.
Multiple Views
Not only do you have a choice of views on the items, but because CRiSP supports multiple contents windows (either as dialogs or as MDI windows), you can simply create a new Contents window to solely display news, without interrupting your preferred project view of files and buffers.
Context Menu
You can access various commands by right clicking on a news item:
Properties
This will popup a dialog showing details of the site and/or news item, including the URL. You can then proceed to make changes.
Pause This will pause further downloads, e.g. to avoid overloading your LAN link or because you are taking a break and don’t want any updates whilst you are away. This item will change to Resume if paused. When pausing, a reminder is added to the bottom of the table view so that you can know you need to re-enable the command.
Options
Pops up the options dialog where you can make various settings changes and edit/view the list of configured sites.
Clear
Clears the table or tree view so you can avoid clutter from older news items.
Mark Position
Used on the table view to add an annotation at the bottom of the table. This is useful when you have a continual stream of news updates and its difficult to remember where you had gotten to when browsing the items.
Collapse all (Tree view only)
Collapses all sites to hide the news. Newly added news items will re-expand the tree making it easier to see what is new and recent.
Kick off
Use this to force the currently selected site to be refreshed from the remote site. Normally CRiSP will wait til the refresh time period has expired. Use this to force an update now. Be careful of doing this too often. Some sites may ban you for a time period if you make too frequent updates from them. Most sites usually don’t update any more often than 30-60 minutes so its normally not necessary to do this.
Refresh all
Causes the timer for each site to be reset, forcing a refresh from the sites immediately.
Enable site
If a site has been disabled (either explicitly by you or due to an HTTP request error).
Help
Displays this help window.
Status
Shows the current internal operation status. Mainly used for debugging of the webnews interface.
View feedThis will load the selected sites web page into CRiSP for viewing. Mainly used for diagnosing parsing errors on pages or to manually look for errors regarding URLs, e.g. pages being redirected.
Many sites seems to publish bogus news URLs. Sometimes viewing the page which was downloaded can help you to identify the real address. Some sites may use dynamically changing URLs, e.g. on a day to day basis. These sites make it difficult to use webnews against. Viewing the downloaded page may help you to identify the reason for the lack of updates for that site.
General
WebNews is a facility for monitoring news feeds on the internet whilst you are working. Instead of having to switch from CRiSP to a web browser and then seeing what sites have changed, you can avoid the switch and keep a constant eye on changing news as it happens.
Adding webnews to an editor might seem like a strange thing, but it is actually designed to improve productivity. With webnews, you can actually monitor more news sites and spend less time browsing, because you only see things which change and things of interest to you rather than having to poll sites for updates.
WebNews relies on news sites making available news summary pages (usually in an XML file format known as RSS or RDF files). You do not need to know how it works. There are thousands of sites on the web which provide everything from major news, technical news, weblogs, music news and more. ou can access the following sites from the WebNews facility:
Web sites providing RDF/RSS news feeds.
Google News groups
eBay auction items
The WebNews facility in CRSP is made available as a pane of the Contents window, i.e. it is displayed at the left of the editing area and provides two views – a scrolling tabular view, or a tree view so you can see what each site is doing. WebNews works by polling the remote sites, and each site is configurable in the delay between polls. For example, some sites might only update once a day, others, such as major news feeds may update every 15 minutes or so. You can control the amount of polling, e.g. to reduce network bandwidth and delays in CRiSP whilst downloading and updating news.
Table View
The table view gives you a scrolling list of latest headlines. Every time a site is visited for updates, these are added to the bottom of the view. CRiSP is intelligent enough to filter out headlines which already appear in the table, so you get to see only new news.
This view is probably the ideal view for occasionally monitoring of new items.
CRiSP color codes items so you can easily distinguish news items and the sites they came from. It also date stamps the news, so that for example, when returning to CRiSP in the morning, you can distinguish yesterdays news from todays updates.
Each news item includes a time stamp, and details of the URL to access the item. Double clicking on the item will cause the item to be loaded into your configured browser. (See the WWW Options settings in the Options menu to configure a non-default browser).
The table view supports tooltips – if a news item isn’t completely visible because the headline is too wide to fit in the available space, then hovering the mouse over the item will show a tip with the complete item in it, avoiding having to change the width of the table or having to use the scrollbar to sideways scroll.
CRiSP even includes a Mark Position command so you can underline news you have read, making it easier to distinguish items you have scanned versus new items appearing after your last visual check.
Tree View
The tree view organises incoming news as a tree, sorted by topic and site. You will be able to see all the news for a site. Unlike the table view, you will be able to see all the current news, rather than the incremental changes, making it ideal for scanning by site rather than age of item. Plus you can collapse and expand trees of sites or topics, so you can hide less interesting news.
CRiSP uses color coding within the tree view to attempt to indicate the oldness of entries. By default, entries less than 1 hour old are coded red to indicate news alerts. Older items are colored green – making it much easier to see what has changed recently.
Double clicking on a news item will launch the item into your default browser.
Alerts Views
The alerts view is designed to provide a way to filter down the amount of headlines in order to watch for specific items. With the default sites available in CRiSP you might see 100 headlines or more per hour. If you disappear from your computer for a while and come back you may miss something of interest. The Alerts view lets you do keyword searches on headlines and provides a way to see just those headlines matching specific keywords. For example, you might be interested In news on specific items (“LCD displays”, “US State Governor”, etc). Every time a matching headline appears, it is shown in the Alerts window as well as the main Table view.
You configure the words to search for from the Options dialog.
Multiple Views
Not only do you have a choice of views on the items, but because CRiSP supports multiple contents windows (either as dialogs or as MDI windows), you can simply create a new Contents window to solely display news, without interrupting your preferred project view of files and buffers.
Context Menu
You can access various commands by right clicking on a news item:
Properties
This will popup a dialog showing details of the site and/or news item, including the URL. You can then proceed to make changes.
Pause This will pause further downloads, e.g. to avoid overloading your LAN link or because you are taking a break and don’t want any updates whilst you are away. This item will change to Resume if paused. When pausing, a reminder is added to the bottom of the table view so that you can know you need to re-enable the command.
Options
Pops up the options dialog where you can make various settings changes and edit/view the list of configured sites.
Clear
Clears the table or tree view so you can avoid clutter from older news items.
Mark Position
Used on the table view to add an annotation at the bottom of the table. This is useful when you have a continual stream of news updates and its difficult to remember where you had gotten to when browsing the items.
Collapse all (Tree view only)
Collapses all sites to hide the news. Newly added news items will re-expand the tree making it easier to see what is new and recent.
Kick off
Use this to force the currently selected site to be refreshed from the remote site. Normally CRiSP will wait til the refresh time period has expired. Use this to force an update now. Be careful of doing this too often. Some sites may ban you for a time period if you make too frequent updates from them. Most sites usually don’t update any more often than 30-60 minutes so its normally not necessary to do this.
Refresh all
Causes the timer for each site to be reset, forcing a refresh from the sites immediately.
Enable site
If a site has been disabled (either explicitly by you or due to an HTTP request error).
Help
Displays this help window.
Status
Shows the current internal operation status. Mainly used for debugging of the webnews interface.
View feedThis will load the selected sites web page into CRiSP for viewing. Mainly used for diagnosing parsing errors on pages or to manually look for errors regarding URLs, e.g. pages being redirected.
Many sites seems to publish bogus news URLs. Sometimes viewing the page which was downloaded can help you to identify the real address. Some sites may use dynamically changing URLs, e.g. on a day to day basis. These sites make it difficult to use webnews against. Viewing the downloaded page may help you to identify the reason for the lack of updates for that site.
Sites
WebNews is a facility for monitoring news feeds on the internet whilst you are working. Instead of having to switch from CRiSP to a web browser and then seeing what sites have changed, you can avoid the switch and keep a constant eye on changing news as it happens.
Adding webnews to an editor might seem like a strange thing, but it is actually designed to improve productivity. With webnews, you can actually monitor more news sites and spend less time browsing, because you only see things which change and things of interest to you rather than having to poll sites for updates.
WebNews relies on news sites making available news summary pages (usually in an XML file format known as RSS or RDF files). You do not need to know how it works. There are thousands of sites on the web which provide everything from major news, technical news, weblogs, music news and more. ou can access the following sites from the WebNews facility:
Web sites providing RDF/RSS news feeds.
Google News groups
eBay auction items
The WebNews facility in CRSP is made available as a pane of the Contents window, i.e. it is displayed at the left of the editing area and provides two views – a scrolling tabular view, or a tree view so you can see what each site is doing. WebNews works by polling the remote sites, and each site is configurable in the delay between polls. For example, some sites might only update once a day, others, such as major news feeds may update every 15 minutes or so. You can control the amount of polling, e.g. to reduce network bandwidth and delays in CRiSP whilst downloading and updating news.
Table View
The table view gives you a scrolling list of latest headlines. Every time a site is visited for updates, these are added to the bottom of the view. CRiSP is intelligent enough to filter out headlines which already appear in the table, so you get to see only new news.
This view is probably the ideal view for occasionally monitoring of new items.
CRiSP color codes items so you can easily distinguish news items and the sites they came from. It also date stamps the news, so that for example, when returning to CRiSP in the morning, you can distinguish yesterdays news from todays updates.
Each news item includes a time stamp, and details of the URL to access the item. Double clicking on the item will cause the item to be loaded into your configured browser. (See the WWW Options settings in the Options menu to configure a non-default browser).
The table view supports tooltips – if a news item isn’t completely visible because the headline is too wide to fit in the available space, then hovering the mouse over the item will show a tip with the complete item in it, avoiding having to change the width of the table or having to use the scrollbar to sideways scroll.
CRiSP even includes a Mark Position command so you can underline news you have read, making it easier to distinguish items you have scanned versus new items appearing after your last visual check.
Tree View
The tree view organises incoming news as a tree, sorted by topic and site. You will be able to see all the news for a site. Unlike the table view, you will be able to see all the current news, rather than the incremental changes, making it ideal for scanning by site rather than age of item. Plus you can collapse and expand trees of sites or topics, so you can hide less interesting news.
CRiSP uses color coding within the tree view to attempt to indicate the oldness of entries. By default, entries less than 1 hour old are coded red to indicate news alerts. Older items are colored green – making it much easier to see what has changed recently.
Double clicking on a news item will launch the item into your default browser.
Alerts Views
The alerts view is designed to provide a way to filter down the amount of headlines in order to watch for specific items. With the default sites available in CRiSP you might see 100 headlines or more per hour. If you disappear from your computer for a while and come back you may miss something of interest. The Alerts view lets you do keyword searches on headlines and provides a way to see just those headlines matching specific keywords. For example, you might be interested In news on specific items (“LCD displays”, “US State Governor”, etc). Every time a matching headline appears, it is shown in the Alerts window as well as the main Table view.
You configure the words to search for from the Options dialog.
Multiple Views
Not only do you have a choice of views on the items, but because CRiSP supports multiple contents windows (either as dialogs or as MDI windows), you can simply create a new Contents window to solely display news, without interrupting your preferred project view of files and buffers.
Context Menu
You can access various commands by right clicking on a news item:
Properties
This will popup a dialog showing details of the site and/or news item, including the URL. You can then proceed to make changes.
Pause This will pause further downloads, e.g. to avoid overloading your LAN link or because you are taking a break and don’t want any updates whilst you are away. This item will change to Resume if paused. When pausing, a reminder is added to the bottom of the table view so that you can know you need to re-enable the command.
Options
Pops up the options dialog where you can make various settings changes and edit/view the list of configured sites.
Clear
Clears the table or tree view so you can avoid clutter from older news items.
Mark Position
Used on the table view to add an annotation at the bottom of the table. This is useful when you have a continual stream of news updates and its difficult to remember where you had gotten to when browsing the items.
Collapse all (Tree view only)
Collapses all sites to hide the news. Newly added news items will re-expand the tree making it easier to see what is new and recent.
Kick off
Use this to force the currently selected site to be refreshed from the remote site. Normally CRiSP will wait til the refresh time period has expired. Use this to force an update now. Be careful of doing this too often. Some sites may ban you for a time period if you make too frequent updates from them. Most sites usually don’t update any more often than 30-60 minutes so its normally not necessary to do this.
Refresh all
Causes the timer for each site to be reset, forcing a refresh from the sites immediately.
Enable site
If a site has been disabled (either explicitly by you or due to an HTTP request error).
Help
Displays this help window.
Status
Shows the current internal operation status. Mainly used for debugging of the webnews interface.
View feedThis will load the selected sites web page into CRiSP for viewing. Mainly used for diagnosing parsing errors on pages or to manually look for errors regarding URLs, e.g. pages being redirected.
Many sites seems to publish bogus news URLs. Sometimes viewing the page which was downloaded can help you to identify the real address. Some sites may use dynamically changing URLs, e.g. on a day to day basis. These sites make it difficult to use webnews against. Viewing the downloaded page may help you to identify the reason for the lack of updates for that site.
Ebay
WebNews is a facility for monitoring news feeds on the internet whilst you are working. Instead of having to switch from CRiSP to a web browser and then seeing what sites have changed, you can avoid the switch and keep a constant eye on changing news as it happens.
Adding webnews to an editor might seem like a strange thing, but it is actually designed to improve productivity. With webnews, you can actually monitor more news sites and spend less time browsing, because you only see things which change and things of interest to you rather than having to poll sites for updates.
WebNews relies on news sites making available news summary pages (usually in an XML file format known as RSS or RDF files). You do not need to know how it works. There are thousands of sites on the web which provide everything from major news, technical news, weblogs, music news and more. ou can access the following sites from the WebNews facility:
Web sites providing RDF/RSS news feeds.
Google News groups
eBay auction items
The WebNews facility in CRSP is made available as a pane of the Contents window, i.e. it is displayed at the left of the editing area and provides two views – a scrolling tabular view, or a tree view so you can see what each site is doing. WebNews works by polling the remote sites, and each site is configurable in the delay between polls. For example, some sites might only update once a day, others, such as major news feeds may update every 15 minutes or so. You can control the amount of polling, e.g. to reduce network bandwidth and delays in CRiSP whilst downloading and updating news.
Table View
The table view gives you a scrolling list of latest headlines. Every time a site is visited for updates, these are added to the bottom of the view. CRiSP is intelligent enough to filter out headlines which already appear in the table, so you get to see only new news.
This view is probably the ideal view for occasionally monitoring of new items.
CRiSP color codes items so you can easily distinguish news items and the sites they came from. It also date stamps the news, so that for example, when returning to CRiSP in the morning, you can distinguish yesterdays news from todays updates.
Each news item includes a time stamp, and details of the URL to access the item. Double clicking on the item will cause the item to be loaded into your configured browser. (See the WWW Options settings in the Options menu to configure a non-default browser).
The table view supports tooltips – if a news item isn’t completely visible because the headline is too wide to fit in the available space, then hovering the mouse over the item will show a tip with the complete item in it, avoiding having to change the width of the table or having to use the scrollbar to sideways scroll.
CRiSP even includes a Mark Position command so you can underline news you have read, making it easier to distinguish items you have scanned versus new items appearing after your last visual check.
Tree View
The tree view organises incoming news as a tree, sorted by topic and site. You will be able to see all the news for a site. Unlike the table view, you will be able to see all the current news, rather than the incremental changes, making it ideal for scanning by site rather than age of item. Plus you can collapse and expand trees of sites or topics, so you can hide less interesting news.
CRiSP uses color coding within the tree view to attempt to indicate the oldness of entries. By default, entries less than 1 hour old are coded red to indicate news alerts. Older items are colored green – making it much easier to see what has changed recently.
Double clicking on a news item will launch the item into your default browser.
Alerts Views
The alerts view is designed to provide a way to filter down the amount of headlines in order to watch for specific items. With the default sites available in CRiSP you might see 100 headlines or more per hour. If you disappear from your computer for a while and come back you may miss something of interest. The Alerts view lets you do keyword searches on headlines and provides a way to see just those headlines matching specific keywords. For example, you might be interested In news on specific items (“LCD displays”, “US State Governor”, etc). Every time a matching headline appears, it is shown in the Alerts window as well as the main Table view.
You configure the words to search for from the Options dialog.
Multiple Views
Not only do you have a choice of views on the items, but because CRiSP supports multiple contents windows (either as dialogs or as MDI windows), you can simply create a new Contents window to solely display news, without interrupting your preferred project view of files and buffers.
Context Menu
You can access various commands by right clicking on a news item:
Properties
This will popup a dialog showing details of the site and/or news item, including the URL. You can then proceed to make changes.
Pause This will pause further downloads, e.g. to avoid overloading your LAN link or because you are taking a break and don’t want any updates whilst you are away. This item will change to Resume if paused. When pausing, a reminder is added to the bottom of the table view so that you can know you need to re-enable the command.
Options
Pops up the options dialog where you can make various settings changes and edit/view the list of configured sites.
Clear
Clears the table or tree view so you can avoid clutter from older news items.
Mark Position
Used on the table view to add an annotation at the bottom of the table. This is useful when you have a continual stream of news updates and its difficult to remember where you had gotten to when browsing the items.
Collapse all (Tree view only)
Collapses all sites to hide the news. Newly added news items will re-expand the tree making it easier to see what is new and recent.
Kick off
Use this to force the currently selected site to be refreshed from the remote site. Normally CRiSP will wait til the refresh time period has expired. Use this to force an update now. Be careful of doing this too often. Some sites may ban you for a time period if you make too frequent updates from them. Most sites usually don’t update any more often than 30-60 minutes so its normally not necessary to do this.
Refresh all
Causes the timer for each site to be reset, forcing a refresh from the sites immediately.
Enable site
If a site has been disabled (either explicitly by you or due to an HTTP request error).
Help
Displays this help window.
Status
Shows the current internal operation status. Mainly used for debugging of the webnews interface.
View feedThis will load the selected sites web page into CRiSP for viewing. Mainly used for diagnosing parsing errors on pages or to manually look for errors regarding URLs, e.g. pages being redirected.
Many sites seems to publish bogus news URLs. Sometimes viewing the page which was downloaded can help you to identify the real address. Some sites may use dynamically changing URLs, e.g. on a day to day basis. These sites make it difficult to use webnews against. Viewing the downloaded page may help you to identify the reason for the lack of updates for that site.