July, 1997

Webfetcher now has its own site! http://www.webfetcher.com

The current version is 1.0.2, available for :

• Macintosh (fat binary) for System 7.0.1 or later.

• Windows '95 and Windows NT.

• UNIX Versions:
  • NeXT
  • SunOS
  • Solaris 2.3
  • OSF/1 for the Dec Alpha
  • Dec Ultrix 4.3.
  • Linux for the Intel architecture

• There are no other Windows or DOS versions, nor will there ever be. Pathname, threading, and serial port problems ruin everthing.

1.0.2
Many people have remarked that it would be nice to have WebFetcher restrict downloading to sites listed on the schedule, and not ancillary connected sites. There's a mechanism now for doing this: add the word 'localonly' to your schedule file (anywhere) on a line by itself, flush to the left margin.

Example:

  localonly
  1 1/1/96 9:00 am http://www.hayoo.com/ 4 w 3 1 
  1 1/1/96 9:00 am http://www.microslap.com/ 1 h 10 1 
  1 1/1/96 9:00 am http://www.notv.com/ 1 w 3 1

1. Hosts not explicitly listed in your schedule are not visited.

2. Links to these "non-local hosts" in fetched HTML pages don't get "relinked" as local (your hard disk) references. That is, if you click on a link to a "non-local" site, your browser will go back to the net to try to find the requested page.

Ideally, these two effects would be controlled independently, but I don't have time to add this just yet... Maybe next week... Maybe never... ;)

Note: The 'localonly' tag effects the entire schedule. There's no way to tag individual schedule lines.

Comments?

1.0.1
Sites in your schedule can now contain dotted IP numbers (like 205.206.184.140) instead of just "fully qualified domain names" (like www.ontv.com).

1.0.0
This version contains no new features from v. 0.9b0, but the expiration date has been removed. This version of WebFetcher does not expire.

0.9b0
A test beta version that expired on June 1, 1996.

• The current NeXT version has a problem with dates related to DST which we haven't gotten around to fixing yet.

• There is presently no support for firewalls or proxies. If you're behind a firewall, you may have problems running WebFetcher.

• Should do a better job handling META tags.

• Won't download Java applets. (A limitation, not really a bug.)

• Should do a better job patching redirections.