A New Paperless Way...

[+kayakanimal]

Hey admins...

I ran across this cool site. https://my.avantgo.com/ Is there a way we can (with a premium membership) get a search to my pda from there? Is it too computer intensive? Can you still make money at it. I just like it because it is EASY! I would pay extra to be able to use this service.

Kayakanimal

[+MrPeabody]

AvantGo has been around for a very long time now. You can create custom channels for yourself, which will download content from a location based on some criteria you set.

 

I used to use it in combination with Pocket Queries and GPX Spinner. I would convert the GPX file that was sent from Geocaching to a series of HTML pages and then post them somewhere that AvantGo could see them. I would then sync my channels and go.

 

The problem is that AvantGo restricts you on channel size to 250K and my set of local caches was more like 900K.

 

I quickly picked up Plucker which is a much better tool for downloading all of those files, *and* it has much better search capabilities.

 

I still use AvantGo to read news and get movie listings, but it is just not effective as a paperless Geocaching tool.

[+kayakanimal]

AvantGo has been around for a very long time now. You can create custom channels for yourself, which will download content from a location based on some criteria you set.

 

I used to use it in combination with Pocket Queries and GPX Spinner. I would convert the GPX file that was sent from Geocaching to a series of HTML pages and then post them somewhere that AvantGo could see them. I would then sync my channels and go.

 

The problem is that AvantGo restricts you on channel size to 250K and my set of local caches was more like 900K.

 

I quickly picked up Plucker which is a much better tool for downloading all of those files, *and* it has much better search capabilities.

 

I still use AvantGo to read news and get movie listings, but it is just not effective as a paperless Geocaching tool.

I was thinking that if we could do a search straight from geocaching.com...using avantgo to go straight into a pda...no conversion required. THAT WOULD BE COOL!

[+kayakanimal]

Admins,

Any thoughts?

[+Renegade Knight]

The GPX file you can get with pocket queries covers most paperless needs. Coords, logs, description, hints, etc.

 

The site is experimenting with a version for either PDA's or Web enabled phones for real time searches. (Can't recall since I don't use that feature).

[+parkrrrr]

AvantGo likes to send a bill to websites that become "too popular," and IIRC the cutoff for "too popular" is something like 5 people interested in the same thing. There used to be a blurb about this on the front page of the Straight Dope website (who used to offer an AvantGo feed, but stopped doing so when AvantGo demanded tribute) but it seems to have disappeared.

[+Allen_L]

From http://www.avantgo.com/support/channel_support.html

Use of the Custom Channel feature is subject to AvantGo’s approval. AvantGo reserves, and has the right under its Terms of Use, to restrict / grant access to any user submitted channel with or without notice.

 

....

 

All Custom Channels with over 1,000 subscribers now require an agreement with AvantGo. We will attempt to notify the channel owner when the number of subscribers reaches this number.

I use to use AvantGo, but I found Plucker could pretty much do everything AvantGO does, plus I can access local files and actually preconvert files to plucker format and it uses less of my PDA's resources.

[+embra]

I was thinking that if we could do a search straight from geocaching.com...using avantgo to go straight into a pda...no conversion required. THAT WOULD BE COOL!

One of the reasons the admins came up with pocket queries was to relieve the strain that data miners like Avantgo put on the server. It's much more efficient for them to send you a file with all the information than for Avantgo to spider out to a set of caches page by page. If too many people tried to do such a thing (and it wouldn't take all that many), the site bogs down.

 

So...it's a good idea on the face of it, but the server hit gets pretty high. Fortunately, processing a pocket query is not much hassle.

[+GeckoGeek]

So...it's a good idea on the face of it, but the server hit gets pretty high. Fortunately, processing a pocket query is not much hassle.

Except you have to be a paying member of GC to do PQ, while you can datamine the pages for free.

 

As for the way to do paperless - CacheMate is the way to go if you've got a Palm.

[+Hemlock]

Sites have been known to have their IP blocked for doing too much data mining. PQs were created as an alternative. Use them.

 

Besides, most pages on the site look like crap on a PDA screen because of the navigation bar on the left. Programs that make use of the PQs have or create pages that use the limited screen real estate much more efficiently.

[+bons]

Except you have to be a paying member of GC to do PQ, while you can datamine the pages for free.

Could someone explain this to me? How can people have the money for a GPS and a palm pilot (the bare minimum for caching with Avant-go) but not be able to afford to send the site the cost of a happy meal once a month? It costs more for a family of four to go to a movie for two hours than it does for a yearly subscription. A month's worth of pocket queries costs less than a movie rental. What am I not understanding?

 

I'd like to buy coupons that give people one free month and leave them as swag in caches. Unfortunately someone would just use the free time and then put the worthless coupon back in a cache. [shrug]