I know that I can go and look at the tutorials. Yep. Those are there.
I’m curious how you folks are using DA in an automated way.
I’m trying to deep vs. wide, on the tools I have. I’ve owned DEVONthink Pro Office since 2008, and I’m still learning new stuff. I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.
I’d like to get more use out of DA.
Thank you for your time and help!
Aaron Kulbe
I used to combe (competitor) sites for news every week automagically. DA crawls through the sites and dumbs anything new into an archive. I’ve done a similar thing with patent searches. The amount of data is quickly overwhelming so you’ve gotta stay dilligent pruning…
Now I am back in a more traditional engineering role, I am thinking to set up automation to go through the various engineering forums I deal with for specific news (chip set changes, library updates etc.). The problem is that many of these forums are on the discourse platform (as is Devon) and DA has a bit of trouble searching through those.
Have you tried having DA search Diccourse as an RSS?
With a search-set you mean? Yes I did and that is probably the best way to search with DA. However, the discourse sites I frequent only give me a portion of the entire feed. E.g., if the site has years of articles in …/support.rss, I only get the last ‘N’ or perhaps it is the last ‘N’ days. I never figured out how I could request all articles in ‘support’ and then search. I did toy with the idea to buffer it all in DT and do the searches there …
If you are doing this as an automated daily DevonAgent search, wouldn’t it be sufficient to get the latest.rss feed as long a that contains at least one day of posts?
The entire archive might be interesting for different reasons, but why would you need the entire set of years of posts for a daily automated search?
True, if I do this just weekly for ‘interesting’ stuff, latest.rss is fine. However, I often search code/hardware troubleshooting issues that may go back years. Most forum search tools are way inferior to DA so using DA on a whole topic forum would be fantastic.
I have two topics I watch that are very specific but a traditional search engine will deliver a ton of irrelevant results for (between spam, affiliate marketers, and search engine bias). But using secondary queries that are very long, DA happily reads all the much and gets to gold for me. It runs weekly and maybe once every two months, it finds a new hit and emails it to me.
Took me a long time several years back to wrestle it into automation, but it’s way better and more accurate than me looking for it!