From: jdimpson@syr.edu
Subject: urlmon 3.0b -- URL monitoring software
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 14:02:39 GMT

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(This is actually a testing, beta release.)

urlmon version 3.0 is released, now with ability to filter out portions
of HTML data so that things like rotating advertisements don't get false 
positives.  The filtering capability is quite flexible, and it 
user-extensible.  The code has been cleaned up, making it much more
elegant and simple.  The format of the urlmonrc database file has 
changed, and this causes problems addressed in the various
documentation files.

urlmon is the URL Monitor.  It reports changes to web sites (and ftp
sites, too).

urlmon makes a connection to a web site and records the last_modified time
for that url.  Upon subsequent calls, it will check the url again, this
time comparing the information to the previously recorded times.  Since
the last_modified data is not required to be given by HTTP (it's optional)
and is non-existent for ftp, urlmon will then take an MD5 checksum.  
Filtering is possible, so that URLs whose content is always changing (due
to server-side parsing or some equivalent, as often used in rotating 
adverstisements) can accurately be monitored.

It's real utility is evident when running it periodically (from cron,
for example) in batch mode, so as to keep tabs on many different web
pages, reporting on those that have recently changed. 

It can monitor muliple URLs in parallel.  It also has user settable proxy
server ability, and user settable timeout lengths.  Finally, it can
monitor password protected www sites. 

Also, I've written a companion script, nscape2urlmon, which merges a
Netscape bookmarks file (Navigator version 3.01 tested)  into a urlmonrc
file.  (For urlmon version 3.0b, this program doesn't work.)

It can be found at 

http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/www/mirroring/urlmon-3.0b.tgz (soon)
http://web.syr.edu/~jdimpson/proj/urlmon-3.0b.tgz
ftp://camelot.syr.edu/pub/web/urlmon-3.0b.tgz

urlmon requires perl 5, the LWP perl modules, the MD5 module, all
available at any CPAN archive (http://www.perl.com/perl/CPAN/) 

The author is your's truly, Jeremy D. Impson <jdimpson@acm.org>

- --Jeremy





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