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document updated 18 years ago, on Apr 11, 2006

 

This is the documentation packaged with Slogger version 0.6.20060410. Check the web for updated versions of this document.

 

Slogger is an Extension for Mozilla Firefox web browser. It is a very flexible tool for creating a complete log of your browsing history (thus the name: Slogger <=> "browse logger"). It can save pages you visit to your hard drive, and create custom-format history logs about pages visited (included are templates for plain text, HTML RDF, and XML). You can use style sheets (CSS-HTML, XSLT-XML, XUL-RDF) to view logs, or use external programs to parse the data for your needs.

Almost everything in slogger is customizable, so it's best to try and see how you can change it. Settings are stored in different "profiles", making it easy to switch between different uses. Several profiles will come installed with Slogger to provide some examples of how it can be used.

But, here's a few random possible uses:

• Personal Archive
Every page you visit can be automatically (in the background) saved to your hardrive (complete webpage, just HTML, or text), stampted with the date and time. With storage becoming so cheap, you can essentially save everything.
• plain text history
Store browsing history as a customizable plain text file. Store in any format (XML, HTML, CSV, etc.) that suits your needs. Several formats are included in installation Formatted history files can link to online or local copies of pages.
• Offline reading
Save pages when you happen to be on a fast connection, and read them later.
• Blogging / RSS
You could set up all of the following to occur on one click of a button: A confirmation window opens allowing you to enter a description (and/or keywords) of the page. This and other information (date, time, url, etc) are written to a custom format XML file used to power an RSS feed of pages you like. The current page is downloaded and saved to [date]/[url].html on your hard drive, perhaps linked to from your log file.
• online servies
Use services from StumbleUpon, Spurl, del.icio.us, Furl and/or My Yahoo! Search to publish your findings online. (This is temporarity disabled in the newer version...)
• anything you want
Profiles can contain arbitrary javascript code.

 

If you are first trying Slogger, you may want to initially keep the default settings, just to see what it does. Once you do, browsing the settings should give you a good idea of what the different options do. (If you are upgrading from a previous version, you might want to reset all settings back to the defaults in case any names have changed).

 

You can set Slogger to do something when certain actions occur in the main setting dialog: Firefox toolbar->Slogger->Settings... The actions you can set are:

• When a page is loaded
• When a page is loaded and a toggle button is ON
• When you click a button

If you right-click on the Firefox toolbar, and select "Customize...", you can find the six buttons associated with slogger. You can drag any number of these to the toolbar to use and set to perform certain actions.

 

When some action (such as a page loading or a Slogger button clicked) occurs, some set of Slogger "profiles" is executed (not to be confused with Firefox profiles). When you click "Edit Profile", you'll see a dialog with a bunch of tabs and a whole bunch of options. Hopefully most are self explainatory, but some explainations will be below.

    Saved Page

(this applies to old version). Note that default filename for the saved page has the complete date/time stamp, down to the millisecond. Including date/time info in the filename not only provides that information, but this also ensures that the filename is unique. If the filenames are not unique, it should choose something that is (such as appending numbers to the end). Note that the files and their data are stored in a subfolder "data" of the main slogger folder. This was done so you can view the Slogger folder in Firefox and see the logs without wading thru a bunch of other files.

  Log File

On the other hand, you probably do not want the log file to be unique for each log since the log file is appended to each time. If you keep the default setting containing date/time info up to the day, then a new log file will be started each day. Likewise, you could do $year.log, slogger.log (a constant), etc. Or using $host.log will create a separate log file for each host visited (e.g. www.amazon.com, etc.).

The Log File textarea contains the text that will be appended to the log file every time a page is logged. Later in the help file, there are some examples of how you might use this.

 

Delay to prevent duplicates

In testing, I noticed that visiting some pages the window load function was called several times within a second or two for reasons I do not know. The option to skip logging a page within x seconds avoids this. Also, you can put a very large value in there to avoid logging the same page twice in a row at all.

Blacklist and Whitelist

Each line is these lists should be a javascript boolean expression - it is evaluated to be true or false. Variables are repaced with simple string substitution, so quotes are required in some places you might not think.

Here's a few you might want to have in a blacklist... (When you click "Add...", you'd enter the bold part below into the message box)

• "$host"=="127.0.0.1"
• "$url".match(/^https:/) - this regular expression match means the URL starts with "https:"
• "$url".match(/^file:/)
• "$url".match(/^about:/)
• $hour < 12 - block things occuring in the AM

   

You can enter arbitrary javascript code that will be evaluated.

Creating custom menu items

In the Slogger menu on the menubar, you can add entries to open pages. You can do this with this custom script setting. Entries can be added with a call to the javascript function, sloggerAddMenu(label,url);. For example, if your profile creates the log file, you can include something in the custom script like,

sloggerAddMenu("View html log","/home/user/slogger/$year-$month-$day.html");

or,

sloggerAddMenu("View XML log","$sloggerDir/$logfile");

This function won't add entries that are already there, so you don't have to worry about continually adding the same thing.

 

You can use this options to alter filenames or log entries each time a page is logged. For example, have something like <note><\note> in your log entry which you can quickly adda note to each page if you want.

 

In all your settings you can use the "$VARNAME" to insert the string value of the

Here are all the variables. This table is generated from the code.

Name	Type	file	default	description	$profName	Char	1
$profDescr	Char	1
$savepageType	Int	1	0	0=Web page, complete. 1=Web page, HTML. 0=text
$localfileDir	Char	1
$localfile	Char	1
$logfileDir	Char	1
$logfileName	Char	1
$logfileContent	Char	1
$text_logfile_menuitem	Char	1	View logfile	Caption for logfile link in custom menu
$logfileHeader	Char	1
$logfileFooter	Char	1
$styleName	Char	1
$styleContent	Char	1
$repeatDelay	Int	1	10
$blacklist	Char	1
$whitelist	Char	1
$customScript	Char	1
$confirmString	Char	1
$url	Char	0		URL of page being saved
$filename	Char	0		Original file name of page being saved (from url)
$title	Char	0		Title of original page, if exists (ie html title)
$host	Char	0		host server (e.g. www.google.com)
$hostinv	Char	0		com.google.www
$path	Char	0		portion of url
$filebase	Char	0		filename before last period
$fileext	Char	0		filename after last period
$typeext	Char	0		'html' if content-type is text/html, otherwise save as $fileext
$type	Char	0		content-type from HTTP header (MIME type)
$keywords	Char	0		user-defined keywords (only writable from confirm window). reset to blank on each log.
$desc	Char	0		description (only from confirm window). reset to blank on each log.
$clip	Char	0		text selected on page being saved
$datetime	Char	0		string like: Thu Jun 10 2004 09:07:23 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
$year	Char	0		Year, YYYY
$month	Char	0		Month, MM (01-12)
$day	Char	0		Day, DD (01-31)
$hour	Char	0		Hour, HH (00-23)
$minute	Char	0		Minute, MM (00-59)
$second	Char	0		Second, SS (00-59)
$millisecond	Char	0		Millisecond, mmm (000-999)
$lastURL	Char	0
$lastTime	Char	0
$lastLogFileFolder	Char	0
$lastLogFile	Char	0
$execAction0	Char	0		list of profile files to execute on every page load (joined by '|')
$execAction1	Char	0		list of profile files to execute on (joined by '|')
$execAction2	Char	0		list of profile files to execute on (joined by '|')
$execAction3	Char	0		list of profile files to execute on (joined by '|')
$execAction4	Char	0		list of profile files to execute on (joined by '|')
$execAction5	Char	0		list of profile files to execute on (joined by '|')
$execAction6	Char	0		list of profile files to execute on (joined by '|')
$customMenu	Char	0		builds menu. format: label|uri|label|uri...
$version	Char	0		slogger version number
$FFProfDir	Char	0		firefox profile directory (eg ~/.mozilla/firefox/---). set on install. you shouldn't change it.
$sloggerDir	Char	0		dir where slogger info is installed. on install, set to $FFProfDir/slogger
$sloggerProfDir	Char	0		this is where Slogger searches for Slogger profile files. on install set to $sloggerDir/profiles
$flipDirSlash	Bool	0	0	If set, '/' is replaced with '' in directories

Notes:

• In javascript code you can get/set any variables with sloggerSetVar() and sloggerGetVar() (one call can get/set multiple variables)
• The variables that represent directories are stored as strings. this is generally not a good idea, but this way it allows you to easily include variables, eg to set sloggerDir to "$profDir/$year/$month".
• some "constant" values are set only the first time you run slogger: profile dir, slogger chrome dir.

 

When you install Slogger, there should be some included default profiles already there. Here's a brief description, but the best thing to do is just try them out and see what they do and how you can customize it.

Included with Slogger: (ver 0.6.20060410)

• XML log & complete pages
-- Uses tags to save history information in XML format.
-- Writes a header & footer and escapes special characters, so the log file is valid XML.
-- Creates an XSL file which is used to format the XML file for display in a browser.
-- Saves (complete) pages to your folder within FF profile directory
-- Filters localfiles, etc

• Test Slogger Variables
-- prints out all variables and values into an HTML table.
-- useful for debugging


• Text log & text pages
-- Simple plain text monthly log file of: $timestamp $url
-- Pages saved as plain text
-- No filtering

• RDF log, XUL viewer
-- Data on page logs are stored in an RDF format, and a XUL file is crated to view them in a XUL tree
-- A custom menu item is added to open the xul viewer
-- Doesn't save pages

• HTML log (Personal)
-- Records history information in an HTML file.
-- Writes a CSS file used to format the HTML.
-- Saves pages to your Slogger data folder.
-- Writes to the same log file as the \"HTML - Business\" default profile
----- the idea is you can have two buttons writing to the same log file in different ways (in this case, two different colors)
-- Doesn't save pages

• HTML log (Business)
-- Records history information in an HTML file.
-- Writes a CSS file used to format the HTML.
-- Saves pages to your Slogger data folder.
-- Writes to the same log file as the \"HTML - Personal\" default profile
----- the idea is you can have two buttons writing to the same log file in different ways (in this case, two different colors)
-- Doesn't save pages

 

(1) Does Slogger work with Mac OS X?

There are some known bugs for Mac OS X. Let me know if you know what they are or why they might be happening...

(2) How do I completely uninstall Slogger?

You can use the Firefox Extension manager to uninstall Slogger. But, some preferences are still stored. If these are possibly corrupted, you might want to remove them as well if you are trying to get a fresh install of Slogger. Find the pref.js file in your Firefox Profile Folder. After you uninstall Slogger, make sure Firefox is not running, and open that prefs.js file (with some text editor) and remove all lines with "slogger." in them.

(3) What folders does Slogger use to store profiles?

Slogger checks the variable $sloggerProfDir to see what folder to look for slogger profiles. On install, this variable is set to "slogger/profiles" within your Firefox Profile Folder. If you want to move your profiles, you can change $sloggerProfDir using about:config.

(4) What happen to my Slogger profiles? Nothing appears under "Available Profiles".

(5) When I upgrade Slogger, why are there two versions appearing in the extension manager?

There was a temporary version that used a different GUID, so if installing a newer version installs a second instance of Slogger instead of upgrading. Just delete the old one. (careful if you were storing the slogger data in the extension folder - this is removed when you delete an extension).

 

Joe Walp contributed the service providers integration.

 

All older versions (XPI install files) can be found found on the web here.

source code