Newsleecher 7.0

Thank you so much for this post, Plato! I was looking for this information on the web and this is the only place anything is posted about it. I've done a quick test of this and it actually works. Created a Newsleecher 7 Portable!

That said, the instructions aren't very clear so for folks that aren't sure how to proceed with this here are detailed instructions. In the instructions I will assume that you will install Newsleecher to the folder C:\Newsleecher and that you will create your portable Newsleecher in the folder D:\NewsleecherPortable

If you do something different then you will need to adjust the paths given below to suit what you actually set up for yourself:

(1) Download Newsleecher 7.0 Final from here: www.newsleecher.com/software (Or from an alternative download source.)

(2) Install Newsleecher to C:\Newsleecher (Don't worry, you will be uninstalling it shortly so no sweat on using this path.)

(3) Once it is installed, launch Newsleecher. Once it opens up just shut it down again. (We are just forcing Newsleecher to create its configuration files in your %APPDATA% folder.)

(4) Now create a folder where you want to make your Newsleecher Portable. So, in this example, create the folder titled D:\NewsleecherPortable Once you have the folder created click on it to open the folder.

(5) Now go to the folder you installed Newleecher into and copy everything in that folder into your NewsleecherPortable folder.

(6) Still in the NewsleecherPortable folder create a new folder titled data And then create a new folder titled temp

(7) Still in the NewsleecherPortable folder delete the following files unins000.dat, unins000.exe and unins000.msg (These are just uninstall files and are not required by your portable Newsleecher.)

(8) Still in the NewsleecherPortable folder right click on some blank space and select New > Text Document. This will create a file called New Text Document.txt in the folder. Rename that file to Newsleecher.ini (Just click to okay the change when Windows gives you a warning about the rename.) Now double-click on that file to open it in Notepad. In the file add the following two lines (once you have the lines entered, you can copy and paste them from here, Save then close the Notepad window):
dataFolder=D:\NewsleecherPortable\data\
tempFolder=D:\NewsleecherPortable\temp\

(9) Open a new instance of Windows Explorer and copy and paste %APPDATA% (including the "%" characters) into the Address Bar then click the Go (Arrow) symbol (at the far right of the Address Bar). Explorer will show your AppData folder contents. In there look for the folder titled NewsLeecher and double-click to open it. Now select everything in there, then right-click on the selection and select Copy.

(10) In your NewsleecherPortable folder double-click on the folder you made titled data. Once it opens, right-click on a blank area of the folder and select Paste -- all the content of the Newsleecher AppData folder will be copied into your portable data folder.

(11) Go back to your AppData folder and delete the entire NewsLeecher folder that is in there (i.e. the NewsLeecher folder and all of its contents).

(12) Now go Control Panel > Programs and Features and uninstall Newsleecher via that means. On my system when I did this uninstall the uninstall routine left the folder C:\Newsleecher in place, though it did delete all the contents. If that happens, or anything like that, on your system then just manually delete that folder anyway, it is of no further use. (Also when I did this I checked in the registry to see if any Newsleecher keys were left behind, none were, so a pretty clean uninstall as far as the registry is concerned. Also on a launch of the portable Newsleecher it doesn't create any Newsleecher key in the registry.)

(13) Now go back to your Newsleecher portable folder and just launch NewsLeecher.exe. That's it done.

(14) Now configure your Newsleecher portable to suit your own requirements.

P.S. The 'portable' that you created via this means isn't a fully portable program. If you change the folder path and/or the folder name that you have the Newsleecher portable in then you would need to edit the information in the Newsleecher.ini file to suit the new path/name. Just keep that in mind, you need to edit the ini file, if you ever move or rename the portable Newsleecher folder.

P.P.S. At a later date I found information on what the function of the temp folder we created is. For details read the post by Smudge at this NewsLeecher Forums webpage:
https://www.newsleecher.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=88561&sid=f4beb9f69426...

Hope this has been of help.

I managed to write and compile an AutoIt script that would automatically update the NewsLeecher.ini file if the path to the NewsLeecher Portable folder was changed. This means it wouldn't be necessary to manually change the data in the NewsLeecher.ini file.

I have posted on Dropbox a zip file containing the script and the compiled exe files etc. The zip can be got here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/t62u9ejk2j9beke/AABA6a9lxEpTidnZ3tlvQbyia?dl=1

The zip file contains the script source code (in case you want to check and okay it yourself - and also compile it yourself if you so wish) and an rtf document on how to use the exe files etc.

Hope this helps.