Technical Notes

Last Updated: 04 April 2008

This page includes information about Desktop Search programs, using these pages on your own desktop, and some information on tools/sites used to generate these pages.

Using these Pages Locally:

While the Magic Reference Pages are a good Internet resource, they could be more useful on your own hard drive. The search facility on Tripod isn't the greatest, and you are always at the mercy of connection speed.

The alternative is to download all the pages to your own hard drive. Once you have done so, there are several freeware and shareware tools that allow you to search documents on your hard drive for words and combinations of words. If you save all the pages on your hard drive, you can perform a search for information anytime you need it.

Search Tools:

Some local hard drive search tools available for the Microsoft Windows platform are:

Copernic Desktop Search (freeware): http://www.copernic.com

Agent Ransack (freeware): http://www.mythicsoft.com

Inforapid Search & Replace (free for personal use): http://www.inforapid.com

The Sleuthhound (shareware, $20-$75)): Includes plug-ins for Outlook, PDF, etc: http://www.isleuthhound.com

I use Xplorer2, a shareware File Manager from Zabkat that includes a file/text search tool (http://www.zabkat.com)
    Note that the free version of this excellent tool does not include the search function.

HTML Layout:

All of the HTML links are relative links, so if you save each page they should still work on your hard drive. Below is the directory structure I use for the magic section of the site:

\books        Magic Book TOCs, authors A-I
\booksjr        Magic Book TOCs, authors J-R
\bookssz        Magic Book TOCs, authors S-Z
\images        Various graphics images
\images\books   Images for Magic book covers
\images\magic    Magic pages images
\magref            Magic Reference articles

Main Directory contains the following magic related files:
../magicbooks/index.htm
index.htm
maglinks.htm
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So, if you create a directory on your hard drive and create the appropriate sub-directories below it, all the links should still work, and you can view your local pages by opening the "index.htm" file from Netscape or IE.

Hope this is clear!

Tools Used in the making of these pages