KWebWatch 0.9.8 review

KWebWatch is a small utility designed to monitor urls, checking for changes

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Steve Hutton

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KWebWatch is a small utility designed to monitor urls, checking for changes. It docks into the KDE 3.0 panel and can also be used as a launching pad for viewing urls in your favorite browser.

Requirements:
KWebWatch requires kdelibs 3.0 or higher and Perl 5 or higher.


Installation

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.

What's New in This Release:
KDE3 port, gcc3 compile, drag and drop url from browser