"Fossies" - the Fresh Open Source Software Archive

Member "websec-1.9.0/README" (31 May 2003, 4016 Bytes) of package /linux/www/old/websec-1.9.0.tar.gz:

    1 WEB SECRETARY
    2 
    3 
    4 1. OVERVIEW
    5 
    6 Web Secretary is a web page monitoring software. However, it goes beyond the
    7 normal functionalities offered by such software. Not only does it detect
    8 changes based on content analysis (instead of date/time stamp or simple
    9 textual comparison), it will email the changed page to you WITH THE NEW
   10 CONTENT HIGHLIGHTED!
   11 
   12 Web Secretary is actually a suite of two Perl scripts called websec and
   13 webdiff. websec retrieves web pages and email them to you based on a URL
   14 list that you provide. webdiff compares two web pages (current and archive)
   15 and creates a new page based on the current page but with all the
   16 differences highlighted using a predefined color.
   17 
   18 Personally, I put Web Secretary on crontab to monitor a large number of web
   19 pages. When the highlighted pages are delivered to me, I use procmail to
   20 sort them out and file them into another folder. Sometimes, when I am busy,
   21 I will not have time to accessing the web for a few days. However, with Web
   22 Secretary, I can always access the "archive" that it has created for me at
   23 my own leisure.
   24 
   25 
   26 2. DEPENDENCIES
   27 
   28 Web Secretary should be able to run on all Unix systems with a Perl
   29 interpreter (and LWP module) installed. At present, it has only been tested
   30 on Linux. Users report that it works on Windows too using ActiveState Perl.
   31 
   32 
   33 3. INSTALLATION AND CONFIGURATION
   34 
   35 Installing Web Secretary is easy.
   36 
   37 - Un-tar the distribution. The files will be uncompressed into a directory
   38   called websec/.
   39 
   40 - Change directory to websec/.
   41 
   42 - Edit the first lines in websec and webdiff to reflect the actual location
   43   of the Perl interpreter on your system.
   44 
   45 - Edit the URL list called url.list. Please refer to SECTION 5 for more
   46   information on this.
   47 
   48 - Edit the ignore keyword/URL file "ignore.list". Please refer to SECTION 6
   49   and 7 for more information on this file.
   50 
   51 
   52 4. USAGE 
   53 
   54 You can run Web Secretary whenever you want to monitor the changes in your
   55 URL list by typing 'websec'.
   56 
   57 Alternatively, you can add Web Secretary to your crontab and run it on a
   58 regular basis (eg. daily). You can even have different URL list files and
   59 run them at different intervals (eg. hourly, daily, weekly etc.)
   60 
   61 It goes without saying that you can use Web Secretary to monitor its own
   62 homepage so that you can be informed of the latest news and updates.
   63 
   64 Web Secretary is available at:   http://www.nongnu.org/websec/
   65 
   66 
   67 5. DIGEST
   68 
   69 This feature is contributed by Matti Airas:
   70 
   71 > Hi,
   72 
   73 > I noticed a small bug in websec. Since I'm using a text-based MUA, I'm
   74 > not interested in getting the HTML pages, but only the notifications.
   75 > However, on line 214 the recipient email address is $email, not
   76 > $emailLink.
   77 
   78 > Also, since I found the separate notification mails inconvenient, I
   79 > implemented a new configuration variable "Digest = false|true", which
   80 > makes the notifications to come in a single email.
   81 
   82 > The modified file is attached to this mail. I hope you find it useful.
   83 
   84 > --
   85 > Matti Airas
   86 
   87 
   88 6. INSTALLING LWP
   89 
   90 Websec requires the Perl module 'LWP' to work. The quickest way to install
   91 this module is to type:
   92 
   93 > perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::LWP'
   94 
   95 at the command line.
   96 
   97 Thanks to Jeff for contributing this tip!
   98 
   99 
  100 7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
  101 
  102 I would like to thank the GNU people. I don't know them personally, but they
  103 have blessed us with free and great tools such as Linux, gcc, emacs, Perl,
  104 fetchmail etc. which I now use on a daily basis. In the trails of their
  105 selfless spirit, I will also like to share Web Secretary in the same way,
  106 and hope many people besides me find it useful.
  107 
  108 I would also like to thank Chng Tiak Jung, a friend and mentor who inspires
  109 me to learn at least one new thing everyday. I am sure if he continues at
  110 his current pace, I will never be able to catch up with him!
  111 
  112 The article "Some Simpler Applications Using LWP" (http://webreview.com/wr/
  113 pub/97/12/12/bookshelf/index.html) by Clinton Wong in webreview.com inspired
  114 me to modify Web Secretary to use the LWP library for HTTP retrieval and
  115 email transmission.
  116