Introduction to the Viggo concept

The Viggo system is an automatic webmaster for a small intranet without the need and resources for a full commercial solution.

There are the following basic functionalities:

There is no need for a webmaster. The system automatically maintains a correct and updated navigational hierachy based on the information provided by the authors and document submitters. The users can access the hierachy in several ways depending on individual needs.
Many document formats are supported in addition to the usual HTML.
Overviews of Recently Changed Documents are available in multiple forms, to allow the users to keep in touch without needing to scan the whole website on a daily basis.
The system is simple and easy to use.

Sample navigational structure

An initial prototype of the navigational structure, is an applet which can be used in a two-frame browser environment. When the blue links are clicked, the corresponding page open in the other frame.

The sample below includes documents in HTML, PDF and DOC.

The applet will need to be rewritten as it has some limitations and does not run under Java 1.3, and doesn't provide individual icons for documents.

Providing information in HTML documents

The HTML standard allow the author to provide some meta-information about a given document. An early draft of this document were written in the Netscape Composer, where this information is entered in the Format->Page Colours and Properties dialogue box, in the General pane.

The corresponding HTML looks like

...
<html>
<head>
   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
   <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.9 i686) [Netscape]">
   <meta name="Author" content="Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen">
   <meta name="Classification" content="Viggo/Documentation">
   <title>Introduction to the Viggo concept</title>
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" link="#0000EE" vlink="#551A8B" alink="#FF0000">
...

Any other HTML document can have the information added in the same way. Most authoring enviroments support entering it in a dialogue box, but otherwise the information can be added manually or by using an Info-file (see later).

Word documents (DOC)

(This has been tested with StarOffice only).

In File -> Properties, fill out the fields as indicated by the following screendump. (My system has ugly fonts - the screen dump will be remade later)

Thats it.

Note: Currently only the doc-format is supported. RTF may be added later.

PDF files (Acrobat Reader)

This requires that the application that generates the PDF file, knows the information needed. The only application investigated so far, is PDFLaTeX where the following template works very nicely.

...
\documentclass{article}

\pdfinfo{
    /Title (PDF-eksempel generet af pdflatex)
    /Subject (Mit emne - bruges ikke)
    /Author (Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen)
    /Keywords (Viggo/Test)
}

\begin{document}
...

Placing additional information in an Info-file

If you for some reason cannot place the necessary information in a given file, then you can place the information in an info-file, which should be have the name of the "parent document" with an additional suffix of ".info".

For "sample.doc" the info-file is "sample.doc.info".

This is currently a text file, of the format - key: value. The supported keys are currently Author, Classification and Title. A sample follows, which is named "oracle sql reference.pdf.info".

Classification: Oracle/Documentation
Author: Oracle
Title: Oracle SQL Reference

These values now override those found in the PDF file (which were rather irrelevant).