Hotlist Grabber

• Version: 1.0.1
• Author: Terry Bingham
• Requirements: NCSAMosaic for Macintosh (MacMosaic)
• Cost: free
• Pros: provides a necessary addition for Mosaic hotlists
• Cons: none
• Remote location: <URL:ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic/Mac/Related/hotlist-grabber-101.hqx>
• Tricks location: <URL:http://152.1.24.177/teaching/archives/hotlist-grabber-101.hqx>

Hotlist Grabber is a simple little utility converting NCSA Mosaic hotlist files into text files and vice versa. The URL's of Mosaic hotlists are saved in the resource fork of Macintosh files, not the data fork were most text-type information is saved. This makes Mosaic hotlists inaccessible and unreadable by text editors like BBEdit, TeachText, or SimpleText. Furthermore, it makes them almost impossible to share your hotlist files with friends through normal delivery mechanisms like email or USENET news.

Hotlist Grabber helps overcome this problem by converting NCSA Mosaic hotlist files into text files. It can also take lists of URLs and convert them into Mosaic hotlist files providing the lists contain valid information.

Using Hotlist Grabber is simple enough. To convert a hotlist into a simple text file, just select "List -> Text" from the File menu, select your hotlist, and give the output file a name. Converting a list of URLs into a hotlist file is just as easy; select "Text -> List."

The only way that Hotlist Gabber could be improved would be if it were AppleScriptable, but that may be overkill.

Eric last edited this page on September 26, 1995. Please feel free to send comments.