Extending the Recoll Firefox visited web page indexing mechanism to other browsers

The Recoll Web Queue function allows using WEB browser plug-ins originally designed for indexing visited WEB pages with Beagle (rip). The browser plug-ins works very simply by creating copies of the visited pages in a designated directory. Two files are created for each page, one for the contents, the other for the metadata.

When activated, Recoll will visit the queue directory and index each HTML page and its associated metadata. There is more detail about the mechanism on the [[IndexWebHistory|page about the Recoll Web queue]], but mostly, you just need to go to the Indexing Preferences in the recoll GUI, open the Web history panel and check the top button.

Franck, a Recoll and Elinks user from New Zealand, designed a method and wrote a script to index the Elinks WEB history in this fashion.

The script works by using wget to fetch the visited page into the queue directory. This means that it would be reusable to index arbitrary WEB pages in contexts other than Elinks visits.

Recipee for Elinks and Recoll 1.18 and later:

  • Retrieve the elinks_recoll.sh shell script and make it executable (chmod a+x elinks_recoll.sh).

  • In the Elinks Keyboard shortcut manager (k)/Main, add a shortcut to pass the current URL to an external commande, e.g. Ctrl-P.

  • In the Options manager (o) /Document/Uri Passing, add an action named for example ToIndex

  • Modify the ToIndex action to execute /path/to/the/script/elinks_recoll.sh %c

  • Save, you are done

For Recoll 1.17, the method is analog, but the script is named elinks_beagle.sh.