General

•	Name and URL The URL field is required. If an URL contains a changing daily date, you can use date variables to get this solved. See chapter Date variables for more information. If the Name field is empty, the webpage name will automatically be assigned with the first bookmark check.

•	Alternative Check-URL If an address is entered, WebSite-Watcher will monitor this URL instead of the entered address in the URL field.

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"Check-Macro" button for password protected pages
If you want to monitor a password protected page that is located behind a login page, you have to use a Check-Macro. A Check-Macro can be created interactively with the integrated tool MiniBrowser that records all your steps when you login and surf to the page you want to monitor. WebSite-Watcher performs all these steps when a bookmark is checked for updates. Check-Macros can also be used for pages that require more steps to get to a certain page, for example search queries. See chapter Web based logins / Check macros for more information.

To detect updates, WebSite-Watcher compares the text content of the new version of a page with the text content of the old version of a page. If these contents are different, WebSite-Watcher alerts an update. If a page contains changing parts (for example a daily date, some kind of advertisement, ...), an update would be reported with each check. A filter can ignore specific parts of a page to prevent false update notifications.

If a filter is defined, WebSite-Watcher will compare the filtered text content of the new version with the filtered text content of the old version of a page to detect updates.

Filters can be created with the Auto-Filter system, the Filter-Assistant or manually. By default, the filter "Ignore all HTML-Tags" is enabled and returns only the real, readable text content of a page. This filter should only be disabled under special circumstances, for example if you want to monitor any changes in the page source code.

The feature "Test filter" gives you always the possibility to verify your filter settings by comparing the filtered content of the new version with the filtered content of the old version of the page.

If you have changed a configuration in the bookmark properties directly and want to apply these changes to other bookmarks, you can check the option "Update similar bookmarks" before you press the "OK" button. This will display a window that lets you select the target bookmarks and the options you want to copy from the actively opened bookmark. See also topic Change properties in multiple bookmarks.