Around October 1995 my friend Shridhar Muppidi found this really neat web site. It was an entire book in HTML, well written and illustrated with great figures. Each page of this book was a hyperlink to a new web page.
Over the next week I must have accessed this book a dozen times. Initially I thought it was great, but by the end of the week I was getting irritated by the slow access times; my web browser doesn't cache well and Netscape caches too much. Furthermore, I didn't like having to dial in to access this book each time -- too slow. I decided that I wanted a copy of it on my local hard drive. This turned out to be a problem.
Copying a web page, let alone an entire site, is a tedious task. You see, you cannot just save the web page because the images are not saved. And even if you save each image, the links won't work. I spent about an hour saving 4 pages of the book before giving up. There had to be a better way.
I did an in-depth search for web tools that did what I wanted, but nothing existed. Shridhar talked me into creating a program to grab web pages, images and all, and automagically rewrite the links so that they would work from my hard drive. [I should note that he talked me into writing it after I failed to talk him into writing it...]
This was the birth of Templeton (named after the rat in Charolette's Web who liked to collect things).
Although Templeton has been in development and used for nearly 2 years, I have only been able to work on it in my spare time. Thus, many features that I'd like to add to it are currently stubbed modules. This current version is text-only and not very pretty, but it works great.
As an unregistered version, Templeton will only run for 10 minutes. Thus, Templeton is NOT for use in countries that do not permit crippled or time-limited software, such as some European nations. This limited beta will also expire after a few months, forcing you to download a newer version. Also, Templeton will pause for a minimum of 5 seconds before each network transaction. Otherwise, this version of Templeton is not crippled in any way and is fully functional.
When you register, I will send you a special code that will remove the expiration date, remove the time limit, and allow you to set the sleep time (delay time before a network transaction) to anything, even as low as zero! And best of all, you will only need to register once. I'm trying to make it so a registered computer will only need to be registered once per machine, regardless of operating system.
Flame on. Finally, there has been a lot of discussion on the 'net about threats toward shareware and commercial software developers. I have put a lot of effort into Templeton and, even before its release, I had received threats to make it available "now" and make it "free" and to "give free copies or else". My response: No Free Copies. No Discounts. No release of the source code. If you don't like this, then don't use my software. Flame off.
Some of the future enhancements to Templeton will include a GUI, password support, multiple operating system support, and other features that people request. Templeton currently runs under AIX, Solaris, SunOS, HP-UX, IRIX, and other Unix variants as well as OS/2. The Linux port is under way. I am willing to put some effort into a Windows version, but I do not own Windows NT nor Win95, so they may take a while. Also, I still need to make registration work under all those other operating systems, but Linux and Solaris will probably be available before by verion 2.0.