Super Surfer

Super Surfer is a new way to keep track and manage your Internet Explorer favourites. 

How does it do this ? 
Simply, rather than display your favourites as text - "Fred's Home Page", Super Surfer renders a Thumbnail of the favourite web site. 
If the web site changes, then the Thumbnail will change too, letting you see easily when sites have been updated.

Super Surfer additionally lets you move favourites to new folders, rename favourites, delete unused ones and change the order the favourites are displayed in, all from within your internet browser.

Super Surfer can analyse your browsing History and suggest web sites to add to your favourites.

Download and Installation

Installing Super Surfer is very simple.  You can download the Super Surfer program from here. Once downloaded, just run the program (ss_setup.exe), to install Super Surfer on your PC.

Running Super Surfer.

When you first run Super Surfer it will analyse all your Internet favourites and then fetch the web page pointed to by the favourite. 
It will create a Thumbnail of this web page and store various information about the web site in an XSL database (see Customising below).

Fetching these web sites may take a considerable time (depending on the number of Internet favourites and the speed of your internet connection this may take several hours).
The estimated time remaining can be viewed by moving your mouse over the Super Surfer tray icon. 

(This feature is not available under Windows 98. Windows 98 users may find the time remaining by moving their mouse over the image of the web site on the main Super Surfer window.)

You may continue to use your computer as normal whilst Super Surfer is fetching and analysing your web sites - our code has been specially designed to only run when your computer isn't doing anything else - and so it won't slow down your day to day activities.

Once Super Surfer has fetched all the web sites pointed to by your favourites, it will create the web pages necessary to display them and set these web pages as your Home Page. Your existing Home Page will become a favourite.

Configuration

Configuration of Super Surfer is started by right clicking on the Super Surfer Icon on your system tray and selecting configure.

The available settings are as follows:

• Auto Refresh Every XXX minutes: When checked Super Surfer will refresh the thumb nails of web sites every XXX minutes.
• Auto refresh is Favourites change: When checked Super Surfer will monitor you favourites and if you make a change, such as adding a new one, it will refresh the Thumbnails.
• Refresh on program start-up: If checked Super Surfer will refresh the thumb nails when you start the Super Surfer program.
• New Page per Folder: If checked, Super Surfer will create a Web page per favourites folder, with the appropriate navigation. See the Change to new page drop down on the screen shot below.
  
• Home page on header: When Super Surfer runs for the first time it sets itself as your homepage and can either place your old home page on the header of the web page or can add it to the favourites displayed on the root (main) page. 
  
• Sort Favourites: Allows the favourites on the web page to be sorted. Web Thumbnails may be displayed in order of
  • Alphabetically - The Thumbnails are sorted by their description
  • Using Internet Explorer Organizer - The Thumbnails will be displayed using the order set by Internet Explorer Organiser
    
     
    
    or by the order set on the Manage Favourites page of the Super Surfer web pages.
    
  • By Creation Date (Ascending)  - The Thumbnails will be displayed with the oldest one at the top.
  • By Creation Date (Descending) - The Thumbnails will be displayed with the newest one at the top.
  • Randomly - The Thumbnails will be displayed in a random order.
• Load Background graphic: This allows you to select an alternate graphic for the back ground to the web pages Super Surfer creates. The default is a pale blue background.
• Get only a new site: If checked, Super Surfer will only get the Thumbnails for sites recently added to your favourites. Existing sites will use old graphics.
• Display Error Code if page unavailable: If checked then Super Surfer will display the error code reported by the remote web site. If unchecked then an old (existing) thumb nail will be used.
• Analyse History if visited at least X times: If checked Super Surfer will look through your browsing history and recommend sites visited at least X times as additional favourites.
• Start Super Surfer with Windows: If checked Super Surfer will configure Windows to make sure Super Surfer is started when Windows starts. NOTE. When this option is checked, the Close icon on the caption bar will minimize Super Surfer, rather than close it. To close it in this case, use the Close Super Surfer button.
• Web Server Port: Super Surfer has it's own inbuilt web sever to allow you to access it's functions via your web browser. If you already have a web server on your local PC, you may need to change this.
  

Customising

All the web pages produced by Super Surfer can be modified by the user, although some knowledge of XSL and/or HTML  is required.
A tutorial on XSL can be found at http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/
All the XSL files are located in the My Documents\Super Surfer folder along with the data files - these are the XML files.
The easiest way to modify the XSL files is with an XSL editor such as Marrowsofts Xcelerator.