Aignesberger Software GmbH

In my previous post I talked about the new “Update similar bookmarks” functionality where you can apply properties from a single bookmark to other, similar bookmarks.

But you can also use the other direction and import properties from another, similar bookmark to the selected bookmark. This can be useful when you create a new bookmark and want to import existing configurations.

1. Create a new bookmark
2. Enter the URL
3. Click the button “Extra”
4. Select “Import properties from another bookmark”.

This will open a dialog where you can select a single bookmark and the properties you want to import.

If you change a bookmark configuration and want to apply the new configuration to other, similar bookmarks, you had to perform the following steps in WebSite-Watcher 4.x:

1. Close bookmark properties
2. Select the bookmarks you want to change
3. Right click the selection
4. Select “Set properties in all selected bookmarks”
5. Enter the configuration again

WebSite-Watcher 5 simplifies these steps with the new “Update similar bookmarks” functionality.

After changing a bookmark configuration, simply check the box “Update similar bookmarks” before you click OK.

This will open a new dialog where you can select similar bookmarks and the configurations you want to apply to them.

How does it work concretely?

In a first step, you have to choose similar bookmarks by

1. Entering a filter (folder/URL/Text filter), and
2. Selecting the bookmarks via the check boxes.

After pressing the button “Next” you have to choose the properties which should be applied to the selected bookmarks.

That’s all. Simple, fast, powerful.

The last 7 days were a bit “silent” here after releasing WebSite-Watcher 5.0 Beta-1.

I vote this as a really good sign that the first beta of WebSite-Watcher 5 is already a good and stable release.

Anyway, we have now implemented smaller improvements and fixes in Beta-2.

And I think that we have also found a working solution to prevent horizontal scrolling when jumping to the first change or keyword. This feature was requested several times, also in that forum thread.

Download WebSite-Watcher 5.0 Beta-2

We’re happy to announce the first beta version of WebSite-Watcher 5.0. Please watch this place where we’ll blog about new features in the next weeks.

WebSite-Watcher 5 introduces a completely new bookmark file format that gives us many possibilities and advantages for new/planned features.

Before you update to this new version, it’s highly recommended to backup your existing bookmark lists. If you have the latest version 4.42 installed, then you can simply do that for each bookmark list with Tools + Backup/Restore.

When you open a v4 bookmark list in v5 the first time, then it is converted automatically to the new file format and you’ll see the following window:

If you have lots of bookmarks stored, then this task can take some time and WebSite-Watcher might be unresponsive during that conversion.

If you only want to play around with version 5 (without overwriting version 4), then you can install version 5 as portable version into a separate folder somewhere on your hard disk. This will not influence your existing WebSite-Watcher installation.

WebSite-Watcher 5.0 Beta-1 can be downloaded from the Beta-Section. If you have questions about this new version or if you run into problems, please use the support forum or our ticket system to contact us.

We have now released a second beta version of Local Website Archive 3 with improved WebSite-Watcher 5 integration.

While it is possible to automatically archive pages from WebSite-Watcher 4.x to Local Website Archive 2.x, you have to open Local Website Archive in order to read these documents or delete old copies.

The combination WebSite-Watcher 5 + Local Website Archive 3 will bring an enhanced and more comfortable way to deal with archived documents.

1. Open archived documents

WebSite-Watcher 5 allows you to directly open the LWA folder that has been configured in the bookmark action “Local Website Archive”. There are several places in WSW from where that folder can be opened, for instance via the bookmark context menu or via the toolbar button “Version” of the internal browser.

This will open the configured LWA folder in a separate window:

2. Automatically delete old documents

A second improvement lets you automatically delete old copies from Local Website Archive. You can either delete documents older than a configured date, or you specify the number of copies that should be kept in the archive.

The following screenshot shows the enhanced bookmark action “Add to Local Website Archive”.

The filter system of WebSite-Watcher supports (among others) wildcard filters with the form

     StartText*EndText

This works well if StartText is a unique text, but if StartText appears multiple times before EndText, then WebSite-Watcher 4.x uses the first occurrence of StartText.

Let’s have the following text:

     List Price: $97.21
     Price: $16.99
     You Save: $80.22 (83%)

If you use the wildcard filter price*you save, then WebSite-Watcher 4 will find the following match:

     Price: $97.21 Price: $16.99 You Save

WebSite-Watcher 5 will change this behavior and use more atomic matches. Concretely, the nearest occurrence of StartText before EndText will be used what results in the following match:

     Price: $16.99 You Save

This new behavior will also be used for the RegexToRegex(…) filter.

If WebSite-Watcher 4.x detects a change in a page, then in most cases the whole sentence or paragraph with that change will be highlighted.

In the example below, WebSite-Watcher 4.x will highlight the whole line if only the day is changed, for example from 10 to 29.

An often requested feature was a more precise highlight functionality. We have now improved the highlight algorithm in the upcoming version 5, the result is a much more precise change detection without noticeable performance loss.

As the following screenshot shows, only the number will be highlighted instead of the whole line.

This improvement will also affect the filter system to strike out filtered text.

A first beta version of Local Website Archive 3.0 is now available and can be downloaded from the Beta section. Please install this new version over the existing version, no need to uninstall the previous version first.

LWA 3.0 introduces two new ways how documents or information can be archived.

1. Archive from Clipboard

To archive the clipboard content, open the “Add to archive” dialog (as usual) and click the radio button “Clipboard”. This will automatically paste the clipboard content and you’re also able to modify it before archiving.

2. Archive via a Virtual PDF Printer

The second method is to use a virtual PDF printer to “print/save” PDF documents into a pre-defined folder. When LWA is started, all PDF documents from that folder will be imported.

That means that you can archive documents in PDF format from any application that has print capabilities. There are virtual PDF printers from different vendors out there, I personally use the open source solution CreatePDF.

Also the search in PDF files has been improved and is now based on a third party tool called pdftotext.exe which is part of the open source package Xpdf. Using that tool gives better PDF search quality than previous versions of LWA. You have to download and install Xpdf yourself, then open the LWA program configuration and enter the location of pdftotext.exe.

If you have questions about this new version or if you run into problems, please use the support forum or our ticket system to contact us.

Earlier this year we announced a major new update of WebSite-Watcher to version 5.0 which is still in development. But not only WSW will get a major update in the next future, also LWA 3.0 is nearly finished. I hope that a first beta version can be released in a couple of days.

Major new features will be available in the PRO-Edition only, the update is free for registered customers.

In LWA 3.0 it will be much easier to deal with new documents, they are all listed in the virtual folder “New documents”.

New documents are also displayed in red and bold until you open them.

After a pre-defined period these documents are automatically marked as read and removed from the “New documents” folder.

If you browse your archived documents it would be sometimes nice to temporarily show them at a centralized place for later reading without changing the original location. This is now also possible with that feature. Right click a document and select “Mark as unread” from the context menu. Then this document will be handled as new and listed in the “New documents” folder.

Welcome to the new blog of Aignesberger Software GmbH.

We will use this place to keep our customers informed about the latest news, to talk about new features and/or any other topic related to our tools.

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Concrete and new questions should be asked in the support forums or by e-mail, the blog comments are not the right place for support questions.