Contents

Overview
Adding a URL to Watch
Watching URLs
Sorting the URL List
Deleting and Editing URLs
Checking All URLs
Options (Changing the Alert Sound, Auto Reset)
Limitations

Overview

URLy Warning is the best way to see when a Web page changes, and what has changed on that page. It's like having your own personal radar for the Web. URLy Warning has many uses, including:

• Watching for breaking news about your favorite stocks.
• Checking auction sites for hard-to-find items.
• Monitoring newsgroups or message boards.
• Seeing if your Web site has been altered by hackers.
• Tracking document changes on your corporate intranet.
• Keeping tabs on your competitor's Web sites.
• ... and much, much more.

As you get more familiar with URLy Warning, you can take advantage of some of these advanced features:

• Choose how often you want to check a page.
• Choose how many words need to change before you are notified.
• Get notified when a certain word or phrase appears on a page.
• Specify a subset of the page to check.

URLy Warning is the product of a lot of deep thought and hard work. In fact, some of the more complex functions of URLy Warning are being patented. However, if you have any comments or suggestions as to how we can improve URLy Warning, we'd love to hear them! Just send us an email at bill at urlywarning.net. Enjoy the software!

Adding a URL to watch

Adding a URL to your watch list is easy. (You need to use Internet Explorer or Netscape as your browser.)

To add a URL to your watch list:

1. Using your browser, go to the page you want to watch.

2. Click the URLy Warning icon at the bottom right-hand corner of your screen.
   This makes URLy Warning appear:
   
   
   
   

3. Click "Add a URL."
   The Add URL dialog appears:
   
   
   
   The name of the page and the URL address are filled in automatically from the browser. In this example, we've browsed to a page on eBay. You can change the Name or URL if you like.
   
   
4. Change the hours and minutes fields.
   This determines how often URLy Warning will check the current page for changes.
5. Set the Pop-up Alert parameters.
   You have three choices for being alerted to changes:
   
   • Never.
   • When a certain number of words change. (This is the number of deleted words plus the number of new words in the page.)
   • When a particular word or phrase appears or disappears from the page.
6. If you want to limit change detection to a subset of the page, click Set Test Range.
   This allows you to specify words or HTML tags that mark the start and end of a range to check for changes. (See Setting Test Ranges below.)
   
7. Click OK.
   This saves the URL in your watch list.

Password Protected Sites

If you want to monitor a password protected page, you can enter a login name and password by clicking Change Login Info. This feature lets you see most, but not all, secure pages in Web sites. (Note: use this feature with caution. Passwords are stored in an unprotected form within URLy Warning. A skilled hacker using your PC may be able to gain access to these passwords.)

Setting Test Ranges

Sometimes a Web page you are watching has text advertisements that change constantly, thus interfering with normal page watching in URLy Warning. To get around this problem, you can instruct URLy Warning to look for changes only between certain words, or markers, on the page.

When you edit a URL, click the Set Test Range button. A dialog appears like the one below:

In the above screen, we've instructed URLy Warning to look for changes only after the first occurrence of the word "results," but before the last occurrence of the word "items." If you leave any of these entries blank, you can signal an open ended search. (Note: you can also enter HTML tags as markers for the beginning and ending of the text range.)

Frames

Sometimes, the URL you want to watch contains "frames." This means that the page contains several other smaller pages. When this occurs, URLy Warning asks you to choose one of the contained pages.

If the page you want to watch contains frames, after you click OK in the last step above, you'll see a dialog like the following:

Simply click one of the URLs from the list at the top of the screen. The page for that URL appears in the big part of the window. When you've found the URL you want to watch, click OK.

Watching URLs

As you add more URLs, the URLy Warning screen will look similar to this:

For each URL you are watching, you have several columns of information and controls:

• The Alert column shows a flashing light when the Pop-up Alert conditions for the URL have been met. Position your cursor over the alert icon to see why you have been alerted. Click the icon to see what has changed.
• The URL column contains a list of all the URLs you are watching. Click the name to open the URL in your browser.
• The View Changes column indicates how many changes have occurred since you last viewed the page. The number you see in this column is the number of all new words plus the number of deleted words.If there are changes, clicking on this link shows you the page with the changes clearly marked. Here's how the changes will appear:
  
  
  
  
  In this example, look to the area outlines in Red. The text with red strike-throughs has been deleted, and the text highlighted in green is new.
• The Last Changed column shows when URLy Warning last detected a change in the page.
• The Last Checked column shows when URLy Warning last checked the page for changes.
• Click the Edit knobs to change your alert settings for a URL, or to delete a URL from the list. (See Deleting and Editing URLs.)
• Rather than waiting for URLy Warning to intermittently check a page, you can click the Check button to check the page immediately. If you position the cursor over the check button, you can see the last date and time the page was checked.
• Once you have viewed changes to the page, click the Reset button . This makes URLy Warning start tracking changes from the page in its current state, and sets the number of changes to zero. If the reset button appears like this , then there are no changes on the page to reset. If you'd just like to see when the page was last reset, position the cursor over the reset button.

Sorting the URL List

You can change the order which URLs are displayed by clicking various column headings as follows:

• Click Alert to put pages that have triggered alerts at the top of the list.
• Click URL to sort the list of URLs by name.
• Click View Changes to sort the list by number of changes.
• Click Last Changed to sort the list by the date the page changed.
• Click Last Checked to sort the list by the date the page was last checked.
• Click Reset to sort the list by the date the page was last reset.

Note: Clicking a column heading twice reverses the displayed order.

Deleting and Editing URLs

Click the Edit knobs for a URL to change its settings. When you do so, the following dialog appears:

You can delete this URL from your watch list by clicking the Delete this URL button.

Otherwise, change any of the URL parameters, and click OK when finished.

Checking All URLs

To check for changes on all of your watched pages, click Check All. This goes through every page you're watching and immediately checks for changes.

Options (Changing the Alert Sound, Auto Reset)

URLy Warning's options let you customize the behavior of the application. Click the Options button to view the options dialog.

Start When Windows Starts

Select this item to make URLy Warning load automatically whenever you reboot your PC. This is recommended, as it ensures your URLs will continue to be monitored without having to load URLy Warning manually.

Auto Reset

When you view changes to a page, you will usually press the Reset button when you're done. If you'd like to have this done automatically, select Auto-reset after viewing changes.

Changing the Alert Sound

URLy Warning plays a sound when a Web page you're watching changes. You can change the Alert Sound as follows:

1. Click the Options button.
   A dialog appears, displaying a list of sounds.
2. Choose the sound to play when an alert occurs.
   You can also click Mute to disable a sound from playing.
3. Click OK.

If you'd like to add your own custom alert sound, just copy the .WAV file into the URLy Warning program folder (usually C:\Program Files\URLy Warning.)

Click here to download high quality versions of the built-in sounds from the URLy Warning Web site.

Limitations

While being very powerful, this version of URLy Warning has some limitations:

• Some pages you access with a password cannot be watched.
• Pages that you access through some text entry forms may cause trouble. (Technically speaking, any page accessed via a "POST" from a form may not be watchable.) If you have doubts, verify the page by clicking it from URLy Warning's list.

If you find any pages that you have trouble with, send us an email at info@urlywarning.net. Please include the URL you are trying to watch, and we'll help.