With a Palm-OS PDA and a wireless modem, it is possible to create and maintain a remote web site. You could also use a wireline modem with your Palm (or Handspring or Sony or HandEra PDA) to do the same thing, but I'm focusing here on the wireless aspect.
There are essentially two ways to create and maintain your web pages: off-line, and on-line. Whichever way you choose, you'll need an understanding of HTML, the hypertext mark-up language used for editing web pages. If you need a tutorial, visit webreference.com, or better yet, the one-page synopsis at wdvl.com. It would be a good idea to keep a copy of WDVL's HTML tag reference sheet handy, perhaps as a doc file right on your Palm. Let's deal with each in turn.
With off-line editing, you firstly edit your web page on your Palm,[ then connect to the internet wirelessly (or with a land-line modem) and upload your file to a web server. This is probably the most batter-efficient way to do things, since you will only be on-line with your modem for a short while.
Firstly, create your webpage. It's helpful to start with a template containing the basic structure of an HTML page, then add the text you need. Use any doc editor you like, but if you can find a copy of the old Smartdoc v.2.0 (which was marketed by Cutting Edge Software ), that is a good choice, since it also has the capability to upload and download files from a webserver via ftp. If you can't find it on their server, you can still find a copy in the original zip file here ; if you're reading this on a wireless Palm, you could install the executable using this link . You would still have to register it to use it, I presume.
Tony Ching has written a great little freeware tool called Tagger to simplify the task of adding HTML tags to your web page document. Note that it requires Palm OS v3.5 and the Poplet kit, which is also available from the link above.
If you are very restricted on memory on your Palm you could instead create Grafitti shortcuts for common HTML tags, eg. create a shorcut called, say, hp with the following contents: <p> </p> in order to create a paragraph tag; the limitation of this over Tagger is that Shortcuts cannot contain more than a 45 characters and also you can't highlight text and then bracket it with HTML tags like Tagger can.After you've done creating or editing your page, simply save the file with the extension ".html", e.g. index.html, and upload with smartdoc. You'll of course need a web space account and ftp privileges in order to do that.
With on-line editing, you connect to the internet with your Palm and then use a telnet client like ptelnet to connect to your web server. Once in the server, you can (if it runs on Unix, Linux, or BSD) invoke the pico editor and edit your web page on-line. If you have a new page you have just created on your Palm, then you would save it as a Memo, then use pico to create the file on the webserver. Call it index.html for instance. ptelnet can copy text from a Memo to the web server, and then pico can save the text and you're done. Actually, the latest version of ptelnet can now paste text directly from a doc file, meaning you can use a text editor like SmartDoc or QED to create your webpage instead of Memo Pad, thus breaking the 4 kb size limit. Due perhaps to character echoing, I find pasting text with ptelnet to be excruciatingly slow.
Any Questions? Please contact stewart@midwinter.ca
This page was created with Smartdoc v.2 and uploaded wirelessly from my Palm IIIxe with a Novatel Minstrel wireless CDPD modem. For edits to the page, I download a copy of the web page from my website using LGet by Laurent Thaler. He also wrote LFtp, which I used to upload SmartDoc, LGet and LFtp to my website. I added the image later with a desktop wired internet connection, since LFtp can only up/down-load .prc files (I think; please correct me if you've found a way to transfer other files with it).
This page was last updated on May 6, 2001.