                   tvdrai
       Televideo RAI Ultim'ora Retriever

               by Paolo Cravero
           release 1.1 - 2002/01/01


INTRODUCTION

I have written this software for my personal use when
travelling over to my girlfriend abroad. Not being able
to understand her local language I have to consult RAI
Ultim'ora pages online. Besides being quite a time consuming
operation, I was annoyed by the overload of information of
RAI's Televideo homepage (www.televideo.rai.it).
Thus I wrote something that could bring to my hard-disk
the news every time I connected to Internet, on-demand.

Its operating principle is easy.
The main Televideo RAI page is downloaded (www.televideo.rai.it)
and the URLs corresponding to each news entry are
opened and saved locally. This process is repeated until
either the maximum number of news has been downloaded or
all new news are on the hard-disk.
The process retrieves older new news first, and proceeds
forward in time. 
There is no status file, so tvdrai lists the content of 
the news download directory to determine the last newsfeed
you have already seen.


DISCLAIMERS

See file INSTALL for the quick and easy installation.

Please report to me any bug you might find. A list of
known bugs can be found in BUGS file.

Although new feature requests are welcome, I do not guarantee
I will implement them: tvdrai serves already my needs.

I, the author, cannot be held responsible for any misuse
of the present software including Copyrights violations, as well
as for any damage it might cause to any (in)animated object.


REQUIREMENTS

You need to have a

- PERL interpreter 5.x or greater
    + PERL IO::File module installed
- lynx web browser 2.8.x or greater
- internet connection :-)
- some disk space to store newsfeeds (1 newsfeed is 3k)

Note: the one shown is _my_ working and development environment.
tvdrai might work with older versions of PERL and lynx!!


USAGE

Launch it from a unix/linux shell:

> ./tvdrai.pl

Make sure there is the ./news/ subdirectory where you
launch it from! Retrieved news feeds are stored in the
news/ subdir, as HTML files. Each file name is the news
ID as represented on RAI's website. The higher the number,
the newer the news.
Read each news using your favourite web-browser (lynx or
links reccommended!).

You can erase files from news/ subdirectory. Just be aware
that next time you run tvdrai it won't stop retrieving
until "$level" news pages are downloaded (see INSTALL) !!


ERROR CONDITIONS

tvdrai aborts its execution whenever it is not able to
retrieve the page with news list, be it for network
timeout or wrong response from the web server.

tvdrai ignores those news feeds that have generated a
retrieval error (typically a timeout), and won't download
them (never).


AUTHOR

Paolo Cravero
ik1zyw at yahoo dot com.
(please have a look at HELP.me file as well)

