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Configuring and Debugging Rules

Configuring and Debugging requires some knowledge of HTML. This is the main thing that prompted the development of Site Sharing because we knew that not everyone will want to configure and debug site settings.

The easiest part of configuration is in the Determine Change By section. Always try an Auto Sense to see if Length or Date headers are returned. If so, verify they are valid and if they are then use them. Otherwise you will need to configure the html parser sections.

The first thing to set is whether to ignore numbers. Also some servers don't like strange browsers so you also have the option to select Turn Off the User Agent.

The next thing to do is to determine if there are any ad servers on the page that are not listed in the Ignore Text In Links Which Contain section. Look at the HTML and see if there any dynamic ad servers that contain a consistent string which can be added. (Looking at the defaults will give you an idea of what you need here.)

The hardest part is when you need to enter specific ignore text strings within the HTML body. To zero in on the real meat of the site, it is often helpful to dump the parsed HTML text. Selecting Enable Debug and clicking Run Now will save the last parsed text which you can save to disk using Dump Current. Clicking Run Now again will read the site again and if a change is detected, the parsed text is saved. The current parsed text is always available via Dump Current and if a change is detected the last parsed text is available via Dump Last. Using a text compare utility will show you what Surftron is seeing and can then help you decide what strings to enter in the Ignore area.

Parse Rules

Carriage Returns, Line Feeds and Spaces are always ignored.
Each ignore text pair is checked as the HTML is parsed. Once a parsed pair is used, the text between the pair is gone. The text pair however is still checked as the parsing continues.
A count may be added to the string using an integer and a bullet (option 8). Therefore:
4•sometext will find the fourth occurrence of "sometext" (only Macs can view the bullet character properly.) Counts can be used in the first or second string.
Check out some of the sites that others have configured to get some good examples.

Note:

Keep in mind that all the ignore text in Ignore Body Text Between are checked repeatedly. Therefore make sure you design your search strings to be unique within the html you are parsing. For instance, if you want to ignore from the beginning of the file to some string, then start you ignore string with "<body" or "<html".