General

• Name and URL
  The URL field is required. If a URL contains a changing daily date, you can use date variables to handle this. See chapter Date variables for more information. If the Name field is empty, the page title is automatically assigned during the next Bookmark check.
  
  
• Alternative Check-URL
  If an address is entered, WebSite-Watcher monitors this URL instead of the address entered in the URL field.
  
  
• Check-Macro
  If you want to monitor a password-protected page that is located behind a Login page, you must use a Check-Macro. Check-Macros can also be used for pages that require multiple steps to reach a specific page, for example search queries. See chapter Check Macros for more information.
  
  
• Convert page to RSS
  This option is available only for certain pages, for example Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram pages. If enabled, WebSite-Watcher converts the page to an RSS feed, which makes it easier to monitor these pages. WebSite-Watcher reports only new articles, not changes in existing articles. See also Facebook/Twitter/Instagram pages.

See also:

• Using the Assistant
• Add bookmarks manually
• Facebook/Twitter/Instagram pages
• RSS / Atom feeds
• FTP files and directories
• Binary files
• PDF files
• Images

Cosmetic Filters

Cosmetic filters completely remove unwanted content from a page and create a new page, which is then processed by WebSite-Watcher. Ignore and Watch filters are applied to the page created by the cosmetic filters.

See also:

• Cosmetic Filters

Filter for detecting changed content

To detect updates, WebSite-Watcher compares the text content of the new version of a page with the text content of the previous version. If the contents differ, WebSite-Watcher reports an update. If a page contains frequently changing parts, for example a daily date or advertisements, 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 compares the filtered text content of the new version with the filtered text content of the previous version to detect updates.

Filters can be created automatically with the Automatic Filter system, or manually, for example by using the Filter-Assistant. By default, the filter "Ignore all HTML-Tags" is enabled and returns only the readable text content of a page. Disable this filter only under special circumstances, for example if you want to monitor changes in the page source code.

The feature "Test filter" allows you to verify your filter settings by comparing the filtered content of the new version with the filtered content of the previous version of the page.

See also:

• What are filter settings (Overview)
• Automatic Filters
• Filter Assistant
• Create Ignore / Watch filter manually
• Special Filter
• Filter with Wildcards
• Working with Regular Expressions
• Cosmetic Filter

Update similar bookmarks

If you change a configuration directly in the Bookmark properties and want to apply these changes to other Bookmarks, enable the option "Update similar bookmarks" before clicking "OK". A window is displayed that lets you select the target Bookmarks and the options to copy from the currently opened Bookmark. See also Change properties in multiple bookmarks.