Archive for October, 2008

WebSite-Watcher 5.0 Beta-1

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

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.

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Improved interaction: WSW 5 + LWA 3

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

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”.

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WSW and wildcard filtering

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

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.

Posted in WebSite-Watcher | 1 Comment »

WSW: Highlight changes

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

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.

Posted in WebSite-Watcher | 3 Comments »

Local Website Archive 3.0 Beta-1

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

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.

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