KWEBWATCH

ABOUT

SCREENSHOTS

more screenshots...

LICENSE

KWebWatch is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License

PREREQUISITES

LATEST NEWS

INSTALLING

Source

Follow the standard autoconf procedure:
./configure
make
make install

Create one or more groups and add urls that you want to monitor to the groups. Urls can have one of the following status values:

NEW
CHANGED
UNCHANGED
ERROR

KWebWatch will periodically download copies of urls that are in the NEW, UNCHANGED, or ERROR state. It will then run its differencing engine to determine differences between the new version of the content and the previously downloaded version.

If a url is already in the CHANGED state, KWebWatch will not download new copies of the url content. In order to move a url from CHANGED to UNCHANGED, you must visit the url, either by using KWebWatch to launch the url in your chosen browser, or by using the "Mark as Visited" function.

Differencing is done using kwebdiff, a modified version of the webdiff perl script from the program Web Secretary, by Victor Chew. The kwebdiff differencing engine uses parameters you configure from within KWebWatch to "ignore" certain parts of content, so that it won't report a page is different if something insignificant has changed (e.g. a timestamp on the page). Use the "Edit Ignore Groups" and "Edit Ignore Url Groups" functions to set up patterns to be ignored. You can also import a default configuration, distributed with this app as the file ignore.list, by using the "Import Ignore Groups" menu item.

From the Web Secretary 1.3.4 README:

        Ignore keywords can contain regular expressions. For example, the ignore
        keyword "January\s+\d{1,2}" tells websec to look for the string "January",
        followed by one or more spaces, followed by at least one but not more than
        two digits.

        Two sections of ignore keywords are supplied in this distribution. "General"
        contains some general ignore keywords which you may want to use. "Date_Time"
        contains date/time detectors coded using regular expressions. Feel free to
        add your own!

        Most advertisements in webpages are of the following form:

        < A HREF="http://page.url.com/advert/cgi-bin/" ...>
        < IMG SRC="advert.animated.gif" ...>
        Click here for free beer!
        < /A>

        Such advertisements can be ignored when running webdiff using ignore URLs.

The "Minimum Length" and "Maximum Length" parameters may also be used to tune the
way differencing is done.  Minimum length  is specifies the minimum
length of a word to be considered while differencing.
Maximum length supplies the maximum length.

CONTRIBUTING


One of the best ways to contribute to KWebWatch is to share your
ignore.list files when you get them working with particular sites.
The default ignore.list I am including is a decent start, but has
much room for improvement.

Of course, you may also send me your feedback in the form of bug
reports or suggestions.  Patches are also welcome, of course :-)

If you are artistically inclined, I welcome help with icons as well!

THANKS


Thanks to Alfonso Gazo for reviving KWebWatch by porting it to KDE3!

Thanks to Victor Chew for making websec available, and the KDE core
developers for their outstanding work on kdelibs.  Thanks also to
TrollTech for making their excellent QT toolkit available free of
charge for Open Source development.

Steve Hutton

KWebWatch is a creation of Feature Complete Software