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Author Topic: Web Link Captor is occasionally useful!  (Read 19649 times)

mouser

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Web Link Captor is occasionally useful!
« on: April 30, 2012, 07:55 AM »
Just wanted to thank myself for writing Web Link Captor -- used it today and it performed beautifully.

Since there aren't more then 3 people on this planet who have used this tool, allow me to explain the use I found for it today.

I have a list of movies playing in theaters that i wanted to share with a friend who is visiting -- so they could check them out and see which ones they might want to see.

Now I could send them the plain text list but then they've have to go do a lot of annoying searching.

So instead I pasted the list into Web Link Captor, added the term "movie" to the post processing, and clicked GO.

In under a minute I had a nicely formatted html email with the top 3 links to find out about each of the movies (typically to their imdb page and wikipedia entry).

Thank you WLC!
« Last Edit: April 30, 2012, 08:04 AM by mouser »

mouser

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Re: Web Link Captor is occasionally useful!
« Reply #1 on: April 30, 2012, 08:05 AM »
I could have also added the term "review" to the searches to find links to reviews.

Since I can ask WLC to output in BBCODE, let me show you a real example of making a nice page with links to reviews.  For good measure I've added more movies and asked for top 5 links for each:

INPUT LIST:
Code: Text [Select]
  1. Avengers
  2. Hunger Games
  3. Wrath of the Titans
  4. Cabin in the Woods
  5. The Raven
  6. Lockout
  7. Safe
  8. Pirates
  9. Take Shelter
  10. Bully
  11. Gone
  12. The Descendants
  13. Ides of March
  14. John Carter
  15. J. Edgar
  16. Sherlock Holmes game of shadows
  17. Underworld awakening
  18. Haywire
  19. Dream house
  20. Rampart
  21. Chronicle
  22. Contraband
  23. Brake
  24. Martha Marcy Marlene
  25. Man on a Ledge

OUTPUT:
Avengers:

Hunger Games:

Wrath of the Titans:

Cabin in the Woods:

The Raven:

Lockout:

Safe:

Pirates:

Take Shelter:

Bully:

Gone:

The Descendants:

Ides of March:

John Carter:

J. Edgar:

Sherlock Holmes game of shadows:

Underworld awakening:

Haywire:

Dream house:

Rampart:

Chronicle:

Contraband:

Brake:

Martha Marcy Marlene:

Man on a Ledge:


NOTE:
If making lists of movie reviews was something I did often, the smart thing to do would be to configure WLC to bias the movie review sites I find the most useful; then i could list just one or two review links for each movie and i'd know they were top quality reviews.
« Last Edit: April 30, 2012, 08:31 AM by mouser »

Ath

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Re: Web Link Captor is occasionally useful!
« Reply #2 on: April 30, 2012, 08:22 AM »
But when are you going to take your friend to the movies? :huh: With that whopping list of reviews to read, there's no time left to go to a theater and actually watch one of them :P

IOW: WLC is waaay to useful!

jgpaiva

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Re: Web Link Captor is occasionally useful!
« Reply #3 on: June 21, 2012, 08:07 AM »
This looks great! You should add this post as an "example of use" in web link captor's page.

jgpaiva

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Re: Web Link Captor is occasionally useful!
« Reply #4 on: June 21, 2012, 08:13 AM »
Also, here's something I haven't understood:
I could have also added the term "review" to the searches to find links to reviews.
Would it do a different search, or can you only append terms to the search query? I'm thinking it would be useful to have something like this:
- movie wikipedia page
- movie imdb page
- movie rotten tomatoes page
- top scoring reviews in <your favorite search engine)
But this would have to be 4 different searches using different search terms, since a search for "batman begins wikipedia imdb rotten tomatoes reviews" doesn't really get a very useful result :P
Another alternative would be to just run WLC 4 times and then somehow merge the results, I guess :)

PhilB66

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Re: Web Link Captor is occasionally useful!
« Reply #5 on: June 21, 2012, 08:54 AM »
WLC looks interesting. Would it work on a site like scribd to search for documents?

mouser

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Re: Web Link Captor is occasionally useful!
« Reply #6 on: June 21, 2012, 10:55 AM »
It comes with python search scripts for using google, bing, or other sites that return search results in rss format.
For anything else you will have to derive your own search script in python.  There are examples of that included (dc member ewemoa wrote one).

cthorpe

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Re: Web Link Captor is occasionally useful!
« Reply #7 on: June 21, 2012, 04:44 PM »
This is awesome!

Another top-notch program, Mouser!

PhilB66

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Re: Web Link Captor is occasionally useful!
« Reply #8 on: June 22, 2012, 07:56 PM »
@mouser

OK, got you. I will have to see whether it is easy to modify the available scripts.

mouser

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Re: Web Link Captor is occasionally useful!
« Reply #9 on: February 13, 2013, 07:48 PM »
Used it again in this thread: https://www.donation...ndex.php?topic=34007

I wonder if there is a simple way I could add image fetching and displaying to Web Link Captor.. It could add another 1% of usefulness to the program.  The problem isn't so much finding images, or even downloading i suppose.. the problem lies more with how useful it could make the final output for sharing..

That is, the whole point of WLC is to produce something that you could share on a forum or web page, etc.  So even if it downloaded a ton of images it's not clear how it should make those available for final output.

I suppose there might be some value in some simplest version which just gave you a list of urls to images for you to manually LINK to with IMG tags or download manually..

Any ideas?
« Last Edit: February 13, 2013, 08:04 PM by mouser »