FIGURE B

Here's an example list of current channels. Click picture for a larger image.

At the top of this list, you'll see a "Create Channel" button. Click on this Create Channel button.

You'll now be at a page like that shown in Figure C. This is the page you'll use to fill in all the information needed to create your custom channel.

FIGURE C

Here's the Create Channel screen. Click picture for a larger image.

To create a custom channel for my Web site, you'll fill in the data exactly has shown.

For the Channel Title, enter "Palm as Information Portal." Enter http://www.monmouth.com/~mconnick/palm.htm in the Location field. Leave the Channel Max Size at the default value shown. This value is 100K and is well above what this new custom channel will actually require on your Palm device.

Next, set the Channel Link Depth to 4. This is higher than what you would set for most other custom channels. The number is high is due to the way my Web site is organized. I've broken the "What's On My Palm IIIc" pages into a series of small pages to make them easier to retrieve and read on a Palm unit. Each one of these pages would be counted as another link down in the site's page hierarchy. Most other Web sites are organized differently, so in most other cases you'll normally set the Channel Link Depth field to no more than 1 or 2.

Next, you'll need to make the decision as to whether or not to include images. My site has few images, and they're all very small in size, so it's OK to set this to Yes. If you were to create a custom channel for another site that had large and extensive graphics, you would normally want to answer No to this question. Large graphics will eat up your Palm device's memory very quickly.

Leave the Follow Offsite Links to its default setting of No. If you answer Yes, AvantGo will go out and pull in copies of all the pages to which my site has links. This will increase the amount of memory required for this channel dramatically and will also result in some very large pages loaded onto your handheld. Most, if not all, of these pages aren't optimized for AvantGo, and it will be very difficult to read them on your Palm device.

Finally, you can leave the Refresh option set to its default: "on every sync." This means that AvantGo will go out and fetch new versions of the channel's pages every time you synchronize with the AvantGo server.

Just click on the Save Channel button, and your custom channel will be set up for you. The next time you synchronize with AvantGo, whether via a HotSync or via a direct synchronization with your Palm device, you'll see a new channel named Palm as Information Portal when you start up the AvantGo program on your Palm device. You'll now be able to traverse through all the pages on my site. In addition, any changes I may make to the site will automatically be reflected on your Palm device.

Now, I'm not suggesting that my site is all that dynamic and worthwhile to keep on your Palm unit forever. After gaining experience with this first custom channel, you may want to go ahead and remove it and add some other Palm-oriented Web sites as custom channels. I'd suggest that you choose Web sites whose content changes everyday and which provide up-to-the-minute news of interest to Palm device users. I can recommend three that are custom channels on my own Palm device: Smaller.com (at http://www.smaller.com/mobile/news.html), PalmInfoCenter (at http://www.palminfocenter.com/palm/), and PDAGeek (at http://www.geek.com/pdageek/portable/). These URLs will take you to pages optimized for viewing on your Palm device. And of course, you need everyone's favorite Palm computing publications, PalmPower Magazine and PalmPower's Enterprise Edition. The optimized URL for PalmPower is http://www.palmpower.com/avantgo/, and the optimized URL for PalmPower's Enterprise Edition is http://www.palmpowerenterprise.com/avantgo/default.html.