


                           META TAG GENERATOR
                                          and
                            META REPORT MANUAL
          Free open-source software under the OSS licence
                          http://www.scriptol.net


Introduction

Metagen generates the meta-tags of your web page from their content,
and metarep displays meta-tags and links.
I have tested successfully the generator on my 10 web sites,
including www.scriptol.org, www.scriptol.net, etc...
But it is still beta and possibly it not work perfectly on a different
programming style.
The more your code is clean, the more the program has chance to work
well. For an example of what I consider a clean code, and a garbaged one,
look at lines below:

<head>
 <meta name="keywords" content="order, clarity">
</head>

<head  > <
 meta nick
  = "keyword" content = confusion disorder
  >  < /head>

In the case your code is so garbaged, the resulting code produced
by metagen may not be what expected, and it will be of some interest
for you to see what is generated in fact.


Caution and problems

Metagen is intended to work on a local image of your site (if your
computer is your own server, the local image is the site itself).
Before to use metagen, save the whole directory.

Problems may occurs mainly with paths. You may receive the message
"metagen.log not found".
Avoid blank spaces inside directories' names.
Run metagui from Windows, not at command line (metagen and metarep
are launched at command line).


Using the graphical user interface (metagui)

In the first field, type filename with the full path of the main page
of your site, for example:
  c:\site\index.html

To report the actual meta-tags or links in your page, click on the
"Report" button.

To update or create the meta-tags, set the options at right (they
concern the generator, not reports), then click on the "Generate" button
to start the process. Changes are displayed in the large text area.


 The file menu

- The Browse command allows to select a page to parse.
- The Create List command allows to build a working page with links on
  pages to parse.
- Save, if you want to keep currently displayed results.
- Exit, closes the program.


 The help menu

- Manual, displays this text.
- About... guess.


Options from the graphical user interface

- Depth of links
  This is the level of recursion for links found in the page.
  If the value is 0, links are ignored, only the page is parsed.
  If it is 1, links of the main page are parsed, but their links are
  ignored.
  And so one...
  This concerns the generate command.

- Display metas
  Display the metas. This concerns both the generate or report commands.

- Display links
  Display links found in the page, at generate or report commands.

- Force update
  Replace the meta-tag even if already created. Not a recommended option,
  as manual creation is usually better than automatical one.

- Display only
  Display the changes, but the web pages are not updated.

- Language
  Choose a language for the "language" meta-tag (according to that
  of the page).


Making a list of pages

You may parse the pages one by one, or parse a whole directory, or build
a page with just links to pages you want to process.

Click on the "Create list" menu command.
The "Add" button opens a file dialog box. You may select a file, or several
ones by holding down the shift or control key.
Save the generated page to use it.

Close the dialog and return to the main panel. Set the depth level to 1.
Load the page you have just created and proceed as usually.


Using the programs at command line

The graphical interface calls programs you can use directly.
If your site is stored in the path c:\site, if the main page is index.html
(this may be index.php, etc...), just type:

 metagen c:\site\index.html      ...to generate the meta-tags.
 metarep c:\site\index.html      ...to report metas and links.


Options of command-line tools

RECURSION
 You can limit the level of recursion with this option:
 -r followed by the depth of recursion, 5 for example.

 metagen -r5 c:\site\index.html

FORCE
 -f   replacing the meta-tags in any case.
The algorithm of generation or replacement is given at head of the
source metagen.sol.

TEST FIRST
 -v    allows to view the results without changing the files.

DISPLAY
 -q    no display.


The metagen.ini file

The options are detailed in the metagen.sol source.
For the language (no quotes):
language=english
or any other one...


Speaking foreign languages

To use metagen with another human language, you have to add a
list of useless words as small.en
The extension is the two first letters of the language (in this
language, not in english).
A small.xx file may be easily created with the help of dictmake, a
set of scripts available at www.scriptol.net.


(c) 2003-2004 D.G. Sureau
For help, mail to: webmaster@scriptol.net
For the last update, see at: http://www.scriptol.net
