UpdatePatrol release history

Version 2010 - February 28, 2010

UpdatePatrol can now monitor PDF files for changes. Through the Setup you can specify a converter to convert the PDF file to HTML, and you can also add converters for other non-HTML formats. Currently a converter for PDF is pre-configured, and more formats will follow in the next releases.
UpdatePatrol can now monitor Google SideWiki comments for changes. This feature is available for single pages and entire sites, just prefix the URL you enter into UpdatePatrol with "sidewiki:", e.g. "sidewiki:http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx".
More information about SideWiki monitoring and SideWiki Alerts here.
UpdatePatrol can now monitor iframes. It will only monitor iframes when the page type is listed in the list of supported pages under the Download / Follow-Links option on the Setup screen.
You can now get detailed information about changed frames, iframes and links (added and removed). When viewing the site in the internal web browser, click the new Details button above the browser window. You can also have this information sent as an attachment to email notifications. Enable it in Setup: Site defaults -> Send Email -> Attach document with detailed information ... or on the site: Alert -> Send Email -> Attach document with detailed information ...
4 new alert types added: 1) When frame/iframe added, 2) When frame/iframe removed, 3) When link added and 4) when link removed. The notification options moved to a new sub-tab under Alerts on the Site configuration screen, and the same change has been made for the Site Defaults options in Setup.
Handling of links with named anchors (e.g. http://www.example.com/index.html#name) is now supported.
UpdatePatrol now strips off data found before the <HTML> tag to avoid display problems on sites like http://www.city.fortbragg.com.
Most of the HTTP error messages now display an explanatory text rather than just the error code.
The download engine now asks the web server to send the page content uncompressed if it detects a problem with decompressing a gzip compressed web page.
If a frame fails to download, the entire page will no longer be displayed as being in an error state. The failed frame will instead be displayed as empty.
Some web servers do not report the content length (page size) according to the HTTP standard, and this could result in a "No or incompatible content" error message. A workaround for this problem has been introduced.
Some web pages will hide the content using CSS by setting a visibility property to hidden while the page is being built, and later change visibility to visible via javascript in the page body onLoad event. Since UpdatePatrol does not execute javascript when checking pages, these pages would remain "invisible" in the built-in browser. A workaround for this has been introduced.
It has been seen that certain web pages add a second head and body section in a page, which would confuse UpdatePatrol and result in partial page display. UpdatePatrol will now ignore subsequent head and body tags to ensure the best possible display of these (wrongly written) pages.
Certain pages does not contain a head tag although header values are present. This would prevent UpdatePatrol from adding its "base href" tag, which tells the internal browser on which server relative links should be fetched from. This could result in missing images and styles in displayed pages.
Invalid script tags are now attempted repaired to avoid page parsing problems.
Few sites will return binary 0 in the HTML page, which is normally used to terminate text strings. UpdatePatrol has been updated to handle this so it does not display only partial content of such pages. Example site: http://www.tempe.gov/engineering/rfq/
Few sites will return partial content if the AcceptLanguage value is not present in the HTTP Get request. This has been added. Example site: http://www.cbaruba.org/cba/home.do
Bugfix: "Garbage" characters like line linefeed, tab etc. is now removed from the detected page title.
Bugfix: Page names could be wrongly generated for non-UTF8 pages.
Bugfix: Fixed a problem resulting in an "error 80090327" rarely seen when accessing certain SSL encrypted sites.
Bugfix: Changed encoding of mail notifications from Quoted Printable to Base64 to avoid the error "The data line length must be lower or equal to BatchSize" seen when sending notifications for certain web pages.
Bugfix: Sound and Desktop change notifications were not displayed if the only change(s) found in a scheduled check was in the last X sites, where X is less than the configured number of concurrent downloads (normally 5).
Bugfix: The download of a page could enter an endless "Downloading.. Parsing.." loop if the page contained a frame link with the src value "#".
Bugfix: If Follow-Links was enabled on a page that used HTML frames, only the links on the last checked frame would be followed.

Version 2009 Update 1 - August 26, 2009

Changed highlighting to use span tags instead of div tags, and changed the CSS code to be inline instead of embedded. This was done to be compatible with web mail services like gmail.
Must Match and Ignore filters now supports UTF8, meaning it will work with more national language characters.
Shows better error messages when testing ignore strings with errors in the syntax.
Corrected a problem exporting sites with special characters like % in the name and url to XML. The special characters would be removed when re-importing the export file.

Version 2009 - March 19, 2009

Support for monitoring sites using HTML Frames added. UpdatePatrol will now download and compare all frames on a page.
Support for detecting changed links (not just the link text) added as an option that may be enabled per site.
Extended the Export option to support exporting basic site information in CSV format.
Now displays how many unread changes there are when moving the mouse over the tray icon.
UpdatePatrol will now try re-downloading a page a configurable number of times in case the first download attempt failed.
In case of error accessing a page using HTTP 1.0 UP automatically tries HTTP 1.1 which will solve most page download problems previously seen.
Made it configurable to display the column value as a tooltip in the site list if the column is not wide enough. Default is off.
Changed configuration to not display the drop target icon by default.
Changed configuration to not autostart UpdatePatrol by default.
Changed configuration to not include www.updatepatrol.com in the User-Agent used by the download engine as it caused problems with some sites. (http://www.casperstartribune.net/admarket/announcements/?query=proposal+or+qualifications+or+RFP)
Changed configuration to set the site default value 'Mark site as read when email has been sent' to on.
Improved: Now removes wrongly entered leading and trailing spaces in input fields on the Setup and Site screens before saving.
Improved: Opening the Add New Site screen multiple times will now only display a URL found on the clipboard the first time.
Fixed: Named and numeric HTML entities and UTF8 encoded characters are now converted properly when getting the site title from the page title tag.
Fixed: Use EHLO instead of HELO wrongly disabled SMTP authentication if disabled.
Fixed: The Follow-Links option now handles .co.XX top level domains correctly when configured to follow all links within the same domain. Previous versions saw e.g. ".co.uk" as one domain named ".co", making it include pages from other .co.uk sites linked to.
Fixed: When using the Follow-Links option, pages containing ".." in the URL are now converted to their absolute path version before being automatically added. For example www.updatepatrol.com/test/../index.html will be converted to www.updatepatrol.com/index.html.
Fixed: Corrected a buffer-overrun problem in the parser, resulting in certain pages using extremely long attribute values to show wrong - or even make UP crash.
Fixed: The default site option 'Send notification by email' was not being used when adding a new site. All sites would have it disabled by default.
Fixed: The default site option 'Save page to disk' was not being used when adding a new site. All sites would have it disabled by default.
Fixed: Problem sending notification emails to multiple email addresses corrected.
Fixed: 'Mark as read' now sets the viewed page copy to the last downloaded page to make sure the same changes are not found repeatedly.
Fixed: No longer scrolls the site list horizontally when clicking on a column value.
Fixed: Imported sites had "Ignore individual changes with less than X words" and "Ignore entire page updates with less than X changed words" set to 0, which would cause UpdatePatrol to ask for the values to be corrected when editing a site (allowed minimum is 1).
Fixed: Editing a newly imported or added site would wrongly adjust the "Last Checked" time to the time a site with the same schedule was last checked.
Fixed: The initial copy of imported sites was not downloaded immediately even though the option "Download newly added sites immediately" was enabled.
Fixed: Editing a site would wrongly clear the last downloaded page copy, making it necessary to do at least two checks of the page before changes were detected.
Fixed: If the configured maximum number of mails to send per hour was reached, multiple error notifications would be displayed. Now only one is displayed every time the queue runs full.
Fixed: Corrected a problem in the download engine that could cause the program to unexpectedly shut down in rare circumstances.
Fixed: If a batch check was running and all downloaders completed their current site check at the exact same time, the checking of the remaining sites in the download queue was sometimes aborted.

Version 3.2.1 - July 22, 2008

Sending page copies as attachments to change notification emails did not always work.
Monitoring a page once a month would scan the page multiple times when the target day of month was reached.
UpdatePatrol could under some circumstances shut down if a web page contained an empty link (a href) attribute when the Follow Links option was enabled.
UpdatePatrol would shut down if a web page tried to redirect to an empty URL (only seen due to misconfigured web servers).
The blinking tray icon indicating that there are unread sites would keep bliking if you deleted the group containing all remaining unread sites.

Version 3.2 - June 26, 2008

Compatibility with Windows Vista improved. No longer prompts for administrator password when starting UpdatePatrol.
User interface performance greatly improved when working with many thousands sites.
Page comparison performance greatly improved for certain complex pages.
Added .jsp and .xhtml extensions to the list of default extensions to follow when using the Follow-Links options to monitor an entire site.
Updated the download engine to support web servers that do not separate web page headers and body correctly. This corrects the problem of certain sites always returning a socket error 10038 error ("An operation was attempted on something that is not a socket.").
The 'Only follow links matching these patterns' option used with the Follow-Links feature did not work for all sites.
When importing sites, UpdatePatrol now uses the default site settings from Setup to set the values for Notify on Error, Notify on removed text only, Show removed text, Include site in scheduled and batch checks, Send notification by email, Save page to disk, Action on popup, Remove all Javascript from page and Remove Javascript by keyword.
Now identifies itself as a HTTP 1.0 client instead of 1.1 to ensure compatibility with older web servers.
Corrected a problem that could cause UpdatePatrol to display a series of error popup messages when the workstation was locked and the site list had focus.

Version 3.1.3 - April 23, 2008

Corrected a problem with URL exclude filters in the new Follow Links feature. The problem resulted in no futher pages being added and monitored if an exclude filter was defined.

Version 3.1.2 - April 9, 2008

Now automatically recovers from deletion of a top level page when using the Follow-Links option. It normally did this in most situations, but in some error situations it didn't.
Added an option to open the data folder in Windows Explorer to the File menu.
More items in the Sites menu are now disabled when no sites are selected.
Would sometimes hang when using the new follow-links feature.

Version 3.1 - March 3, 2008

Added an option to automatically check all pages of a web site (also known as site crawling or spidering). The links found in pages are extracted and added to UpdatePatrol automatically. You can limit the link following to a specific folder, a specific domain, a maximum depth etc. You can also apply whitelist and blacklist match patterns to the links, e.g. to filter out links to a certain section of a site. Use this feature with care, as you can quickly end up with a lot of pages in UpdatePatrol. It is recommended to put sites where you enable this new Follow Links feature into separate folders.
Added options to ignore minor changes. You can specify the minimum number of changed words per individual change and the minimum number of changed words on the entire page. If the changes contain less words than the limits configured, you are not alerted about the change.
Added new 'Hide when minimized' option which will hide UpdatePatrol from the taskbar when minimized (old standard behavior). Disable it to always have UpdatePatrol on your taskbar.
Added option to save the current page to disk when a change or error is found. You can specify a global folder and filename to use, or you can override the options per site. It is possible to use dynamic naming, allowing you to use the current date, time, URL, page title etc. in the filename.
It is now possible to set default values for a lot of options, making it more convenient to add new sites. The supported options are: Group, Notify on error, Notify on removed text only, Show removed text, Include in scheduled and batch checks, Send email, Save to disk, Popups allowed, Remove all javascript and Remove javascript by keyword.
Improved web page download engine. This speeds up downloading, corrects a problem causing checking of some sites to return a 'No or incompatible content' error message and corrects a problem accessing certain SSL enabled web sites.
Deleting multiple sites is now much faster.
If a space is entered in a URL, it is automatically converted to the correct encoded value

Version 3.0 - October 15, 2007

Added option to have update notifications sent by email. You can configure default email settings that are used by all sites, but can override them per site if needed. The changed page can be sent in a HTML email, you can sent a custom note in a non-HTML email, and you can select to have the old, current and/or changed version included as attachment(s).
The option to remove javascript based on keywords now also applies to links to external javascript files (the 'src' attribute of the 'script' tag), allowing you to remove external scripts too based on their URL. Several external statistics scripts are now removed by default as they slow down the display of the page (which ones are configurable in Setup).
Added new keyboard shortcuts: F5 - Refresh site list, F9 - Check all sites, CTRL-Q - Mark selected site(s) as read, CTRL-U - Mark selected site(s) as unread.
Improved web page download engine. This corrects a problem causing checking of some sites to return a 'Connection Closed Gracefully' error message instead of the downloaded page.
Columns visible and column order in the site list made configurable.
Referrer and User-Agent made configurable.
When a new site has been added, UpdatePatrol will automatically download its first copy. Previously it would re-download it again almost immediately when the download scheduler ran.
Fixed a display problem in the status bar for URLs with parameters.
Changing the schedule of an existing site did not reset the last scheduled check timestamp, causing the next scheduled checks to be done at the wrong time.
Changing the URL of a site did not clear the previously cached pages, causing the first download of the new page to show everything as changed.
User interface made more responsive while checking sites.
After a new site is added, the table row is selected, but it was not possible to right-click it and choose "Edit" until you had clicked on that or another row.

Version 2.3 - May 6, 2007

Added new global configuration option 'Download new sites immediately'. Enable to download the first copy of a page immediately after adding it. If disabled, the first copy is downloaded the first time the schedule is run and you may miss updates from the time the site was added until the schedule is run the first time.
Added new global configuration option 'Catch up on missed schedules'. When enabled, sites will be checked when UpdatePatrol starts if the last scheduled check was missed. For example, if you have a site to be checked every monday, and you don't run UpdatePatrol monday, the site will be checked when you start UpdatePatrol tuesday. Leaving the option off will only check the site on mondays, but may skip a check if you don't run UpdatePatrol every monday at the scheduled check time.
You can now specify a proxy hostname and port to be used by the page downloader instead of the default IE proxy settings. Specify a static proxy here if a PAC script is used in IE to automatically configure a proxy.
After adding a new site, the site list is now scrolled so the new site is visible and selected.
The selected group now stays highlighted when the focus is moved to the site list.
When dragging a site to a new group, the group tree is now automatically scrolled up or down when the mouse cursor is placed at the top or bottom of the tree.
Now remembers size of top panel (groups and site list).
Sites with weekly and monthly check schedules would under some circumstances not be checked.
The groups were not correctly populated on the Add Site window if you added a site by dragging it to the Drop Target window before the main application window had been displayed.
Corrected a problem jumping to the next/previous change in a page when the option 'Show removed text' was enabled.
If you edited the URL of a site after having checked the site at least once after starting UpdatePatrol, the new URL would not be displayed in the site list.

Version 2.2 - December 20, 2006

It is now configurable if you want to search for your entered keywords in URLs, names, descriptions or any combination of those.
It is now configurable if searches should be case sensitive.
Greatly improved display of tracked XML pages that are not Atom, RSS or RDF feeds.
Corrected a problem with redirects where the URL redirected to could be detected as being a duplicate URL, resulting in the URL being deleted.
Site import now automatically prefixes URLs with http:// if not already done.

Version 2.1 - November 21, 2006

Import Wizard added - you can now import sites from UpdatePatrol export files, Internet Explorer favorites, Firefox bookmark files and text/CSV files. It's now configurable if you want to update your existing sites based on the import file or if you want to discard duplicates entirely (previous behavior).
Default blog style changed to a more modern look (old look can be restored in Setup).
A new way of highlighting changes has been implemented. Previously <font> tags were inserted around the changed text, but to work around a bug we found in Internet Explorer, it was necessary to change the way highlighting was done. The previous method caused the embedded Internet Explorer to crash when viewing changed pages on e.g. www.nola.com. The new method uses an embedded stylesheet and highlights changes by adding <div> tags around the changed text.
Now uses significantly less memory over time.
Does not scroll to first change if user has already begun scrolling the page. Works with most pages.
Saves last export directory and uses that as default directory on future exports.
Blog layout change now takes effect immediately without re-checking sites (after initially having checked them once after upgrading to 2.1).
Corrected a problem where UpdatePatrol in some rare circumstances could become unresponsive and never return to normal processing unless it was restarted.
If a tracked URL permanently redirects to a URL already being tracked, the duplicate entry is automatically deleted.

Version 2.0 - September 28, 2006

This version is a re-branding release with a few improvements.

The product was renamed from DeltaSpy to UpdatePatrol. Some people connected the "Spy"-word in DeltaSpy with spyware, so to avoid any confusion we decided to change the name. UpdatePatrol is ofcouse 100% spyware-free.
A problematic user interface component was replaced. This should get rid of all the sporadic errors causing the error reporting window to pop up.
Compatibility with web sites not honoring HTTP HEAD requests.
Compatibility with web sites using the <BASE HREF> tag.
Improved page download speed
Now handles redirects to URLs with invalid parameter format (no / before first ?).
Relative links in meta refresh tags are now replaced with a fully qualified link on-the-fly.

Version 1.9 - April 11, 2006

This version is a maintenance release with several improvements.

A parser problem that resulted in javascript errors on certain web pages has been corrected.
The quote character to be added to quoted attribute values is now determined based on the existence of quotes within the attribute value itself (e.g. if single quote characters exist, double quote characters are used).
Importing sites from an exported XML file could cause http login username and password to get a random value for sites where no username or password were specified.
The database file could not be opened if the windows login name contained special characters like French accented characters (the database file is stored in C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\UpdatePatrol).
A problem report was generated if you highlighted a site, clicked on a new group with fewer sites, and then double-clicked a site in the refreshed site list.
Fixed a problem displaying sites that modified the page head section using javascript constructs like this: "document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(link)"
Now handles sites that let HEAD requests time out instead of replying to them.
Made it configurable to silently ignore javascript errors (instead of having Internet Explorer show a javascript debugger).
Added "forced check" option to site list popup-menu. Use this to force a parsing of a page even though the CRC-checksum is the same as the current local copy of the page.
Fixed a display problem causing special characters and HTML code to be displayed wrong in some blog feeds.
HTML entities are no longer converted to ISO-8859-1 characters as they were displayed wrong if charset was set to UTF-8 in the meta tags of the page.

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UpdatePatrol requires a PC running Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, Server 2003 or 2008.