How to make good channels?

# Find the best source data
# Configure WatzNewÖ to use HTTP ranges

Here we will give you some advices on how to make good and fast channels for WatzNewÖ.

Find the best source data

When deciding, what document to monitor, try to find the best page on the server with the needed information. This means that:

• The page should be as small as possible.
• The desired information should be close to the beginning of html document, so you could specify the HTTP ranges for it.
• The search pattern should match the narrowest document part possible (that means all parameters retrieved by the search pattern should be close to each other in html document.
• Some servers offer you to see the page as 'text mode only' or as 'printable version'. Printable versions are often smaller than original full-graphic versions. You should prefer these ones.
• Some servers use a kind of "back-end" information with the latest news in the addition to html pages (i.e. http://www.wired.com/news_drop/free/free.txt). These are the best source for WatzNewÖ channels.
• Internet Explorer's Active channels (*.cdf files), Netscape's channels in RSS format (more about RSS here) that are distributed by many web sites, are the same good source to monitor for updates. These files are simply the text data with XML tags, which are very good to make search patterns for.
• Generally, XML files are the best source to be monitorred. They contain just the data and have the best format to write search patterns for. For a bunch of news in XML format please visit http://www.xmltree.com/.

Configure WatzNewÖ to use HTTP ranges

Specifying HTTP ranges in channel properties is an effective way to reduce the channel update time. By the means of ranges, you tell the server what part of the document to load. Please use ranges whenever possible, because they can decrease the update time greatly.

First of all, you should determine what values to specify for the range. Do the following: open the channel's properties on a 'Search Pattern' tab, perform your search clicking on a search button (marked by the arrow on the screenshot below) and look for the range values in the status bar of the page source window that will come up.

Then click on a 'General' tab, check the option '■ Load range (in bytes)' and specify the range for this channel (see the screenshot below). Your range should be looser by 2-10 Kb than the one determined in the previous step.

All numbers are byte offsets from the beginning of the page. The first byte has offset = 0.

Range types:

• X-Y means 'load the specified byte range'.
• X- means 'load from the X-th byte till the end'.
• -Y means 'load last Y bytes'.

Examples of ranges:

• 0-1999 means 'first 2000 bytes'.
• 500-699 means '200 bytes starting from the offset 500'.
• -500 means 'final 500 bytes'.
• 9500- means 'everything from the 9500th byte till the end'.

You can specify not only a single range of bytes, or a set of ranges, delimited by commas:

• 0-299,-1000 means 'first 300 bytes and final 1000 bytes'.

You can also simply specify a maximum limit of bytes to load:

• 3000 means 'first 3000 bytes'.

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