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HouseSpider installation for version 4.0

Keith L. Jackson, May 2000

Slightly modified and published on SourceForge by Hans Fr. Nordhaug, January 2001

Download the Required Files

Downloads of this and later versions are best done on the SourceForge Project page but for convience you can pick them up here as well (but it might be slower):

HouseSpider.jar
You only need one of the following collection of buttons:

Installing the HouseSpider Applet

The HouseSpider applet is in a jar that must be copied to the same host as your web site. In addition you need to copy one (or all) of the button jars to the same location. Make sure that you copy the file as binary format. A sample HTML tag is as follows:

<applet code="HouseSpider.class" archive="HouseSpider.jar,buttons.bevel.jar" width="90%" height="200">
 <param name="URLStart" value="http://housespider.sourceforge.net/doc/ver40/">
 <param name="bgcolour" value="FFFFFF">
 <param name="fgcolour" value="666666">
</applet>

The code="HouseSpider.class" is required identify the applet to run. The applet must be named "HouseSpider.class" (case matters), it will not work if its name is altered. The archive="HouseSpider.jar" is required and may include a path if you are calling the applet from a different directory The width and height should be set to a minimum of 450 * 200, I prefer width="90%" and height="200" or more. The applet tag may be followed by four optional parameters:

URLStart: Optional. This sets the base URL for your site. This URL must be to your site's base directory, not to a file, and end with a slash. If the "URL" parameter is not passed, the page with the applet tag is used for resolving relative URLs (this may be useful for testing online and offline copies of your search page.)
bgcolour: Optional. This sets the background colour. Use a standard six-digit hexadecimal string (like in the <BODY BGCOLOR="FFFFFF"> tag) or HouseSpider will default to a white background.
fgcolour: Optional. This sets the foreground colour. Use a standard six-digit hexadecimal string (like in the <BODY BGCOLOR="FFFFFF"> tag) or HouseSpider will default to a black foreground.
Target: The frame into which the page is opened - defaults to self.

Check out the applet tag in this page.

Now test your site and see how it works!

Indexing Your Web Site

You need to invoke the HouseSpider applet from a command line, something like "appletviewer indexsetup.html" (the latest Java Runtime Environment is required). The file "indexsetup.html" should contain the following tags:

<html>
<body>
 <applet code="HouseSpider.class" codebase="/local/www/dir/jars/"
   archive="HouseSpider.jar,buttons.bevel.jar" width="400" height="200">
  <param name="URLStart" value="http://your.web.server/dir/startfile">
  <param name="bgcolour" value="FFFFFF">
  <param name="fgcolour" value="666666">
  <param name="SaveDir" value="/local/www/dir/">
 </applet>
</body>
</html>

where "SaveDir" tells where you want to save the index file "HouseSpider.index". "codebase" tells where the jar files are stored. The URL, "URLStart", may be to a local copy or remote copy of your site, but you will probably want to index a local copy of your site before you upload it to the server.

Type "houseindex" in the text input box to index your site. You may need to set the security mode for the appletviewer to unrestricted. My settings are:

acl.read=/local/www/dir/
acl.write=/local/www/dir/
appletviewer.security.mode=unrestricted

If all goes well, one file will be generated, "HouseSpider.index".

After indexing, a statistics report is generated that lists how many pages that where indexed and pages with missing title tags.

HouseSpider is capable of indexing 10000 web pages and 10000 key words. Memory is not the issue, but size of the index file is. I figure that an index file of 100k will still be acceptable, but anything larger will probably be too slow in loading.

License

HouseSpider is free.

Open Source Code

HouseSpider is open source and being distributed under the GNU General Public license. If you decide to modify HouseSpider, and your modifications are improvements (as opposed to simple GUI modifications) please submit a patch on the SourceForge Project page

Source

Source code for this and later versions are found on the SourceForge Project page.

Known Problems

Spider search doesn't seem to work with Netscape 6 and Opera 6 - tested on Windows. However, it does work with Netscape Communicator 4.x. Cache searching works on all browsers as far as I know - submit bug reports on the SourceForge Project page.
HouseSpider applet does not work on Netscape 4.x for the Macintosh. This is very annoying, as it works fine on Netscape 4.x for Wintel even though the version of the virtual machine (as indicated on the Java console) is identical. The problem appears to be that the class ActionListener is not present or properly implimented in the Mac version.
HouseSpider requires Java 1.1. Older java capable browsers will not load the applet.

Acknowledgments

I thank Tim Tyler for the ImageLoader class.