Copyright: (C)1998 Voodoo Software Ltd.
Citation: (C)1998 Voodoo Software Ltd.


Welcome to Web Leech 2
Welcome to Web Leech 2.2

Since WebLeech was released late in 1997, we’ve been busy working on improvements to the original system. Along with reports which we’ve received from you, the user, we’ve developed this new version which not only includes a lot of the changes that you’ve requested but also a few little tricks that we were keeping up our sleeves.

New features in this version include

•	Save Username & Password details
One of the biggest problems with the first version was that you were not able to connect to sites which required some sort of user authentication. Fortunately we’ve now included this feature and you can connect to such sites with ease, and easily download any files on the site without needing to enter a password for each file.

•	Cache Site Information
Another new feature, already implemented by many modern browsers is the ability to “cache” site information so that you don’t necessarily need to re-connect to a site each time to view the file information. Web Leech 2 lets you specify how many sites you wish to cache and the next time you load the application the source/logon information for this site will be loaded automatically.

•	New Explorer-esque interface
We’ve cleaned up the user interface too, letting you use the familiar Explorer interface which allows you to drag-and-drop files between your local machine and a remote site.

•	Browser Integration
Since a lot of the time you’ll be leeching sites that you’ve just been browsing in your favorite browser we’ve made it easier to select a site to leech from. Using the WebLeech explorer you are able to retrieve the current URL from either Netscape or Internet Explorer.

•	Automatically inform you of updates.
More and more applications these days give their users the ability to automatically download new versions of the software from the net, or inform the user that their current version is not up-to-date. We’ve now implemented this feature into WebLeech2.

As you can see, we’ve spent a lot of time improving the already excellent WebLeech. We don’t believe in SHAREWARE that ends up being crippled after 30 days, or plagued with Nag-Screens, that’s why we’re also releasing this product as FREEWARE. This product if a fully functional version with no limitations. However, if you like the product and would like to see development continue on the series then we would accept any donations, please contact sales@voodoo-software.com for information.

 Getting Started


Getting Started
Getting Started..

Users of the previous version of WebLeech should know the procedure for downloading files by now, however, even if you are a veteran of the first version, there are enough changes in the system for you to warrant taking five minutes to read the getting started section.

There are two main actions that are needed to download your files, and these are explained in detail in the following sections.

 Connecting to a site

 Downloading Files

 Setting Program Options


Connecting to a site
Connecting to a site..

You can enter the URL of the site you wish to connect to in this box. You do not have to enter http:// before the URL; WebLeech2 will do this automatically. Once you’ve entered the URL, you can either press ENTER or click on the CONNECT button.

Whilst we’re connecting to the site you’ll notice that the status bar at the bottom of the WebLeech2 display will show the current connection status. Once we’ve retrieved the HTML source the parser will firstly check the source to see if it is a frame source and contains references to framed sub-documents.

Frameset pages
If the retrieved page is a frameset page then WebLeech will treat this one as a directory and the framed pages that it references will be displayed as sub-directories.

FTP Directory Browser pages.
Some servers when returning a response as a directory, all files are actually references to FTP locations, (these are denoted by the BASE=”ftp://” tag in the source). If WebLeech2 receives a response like this one then the user will be informed that WEB LEECH 2 cannot handle this type of response and that you should use an FTP Client to retrieve these files.

Assuming that it is a standard HTML file response that we get, the parser will then read the source, extracting all the links on the page. Once we’ve retrieved all the links on the page we are able to display them to you as either files (file links) or sub-directories (other sites or other HTML files). These files/dirs are displayed on the right-hand window along with additional information about this file.

Related Information

Connecting to sites, which require authentication.

Setting the Parser Accuracy.


Downloading Files
Leeching (Downloading) Files from a remote site

Once you’ve successfully connected to a site, you will be presented (as long as the application found valid links) with a list of files available for downloading from the URL that you supplied. Files are displayed as small disk icons, and links (directories) are displayed as directories would be displayed in explorer. You will not be able to download directories to your local machine, to open these you can just double-click on the directory and WEB LEECH 2 will then connect to the new URL and parse the file information again.

You can select the files you wish to download in the same way as you would in Windows Explorer. You can either use the mouse and select multiple files by grouping them together, or you can use the mouse with the CTRL or SHIFT keys to select individual files or groups (also, as in Explorer, using CTRL+A will select ALL files).

Once you’ve decided which files you wish to download, you can either right-click on the files and select “Save As…”. This will bring up a Save dialog and select a location to save the files to; alternatively you can drag the file(s) that you’ve selected from the left-hand file pane to the destination directory in the right-hand pane. [N.B we do not check if a destination is read-only because of devices as CD-R’s and removable drives would normally be treated as read-only]. You can only drag files to local drives, attempting to drag to another location (such as a remote drive or just “My PC” will just return a message informing you of this).

Once WEB LEECH 2 has finished downloading all the files that you’ve selected, a message box will be displayed, giving you information about the number of files transferred, total number of errors, time taken, bytes transferred and finally a list of files which were NOT transferred. (Either because errors occurred in the XFer process – usually because the file has been removed from the remote server or perhaps a copy of the file already existed on the local machine and the option has been set to skip existing files).

Additional Information

Copying files between local drives.

Refreshing the site’s source & data.


WebLeech Options
WebLeech2 Options

The majority of the program options in WEB LEECH 2 will already be familiar to you if you’re an existing WL user, and these common options have been grouped together in the first “program options” tab.

The majority of options are pretty much self-explanatory, particular attention must be bought the “Parser Accuracy” option.

 Advanced Options


Setting the Parser Accuracy
Setting the Parser Accuracy.

Because not all HTML source is written in the same way we have to be careful how we determine which items on a page are actually links and which are just text that is to be displayed on the screen.

Normally we look for the <A HREF= tag, but some people may have split this over a number of lines or inserted values between the A and the HREF. This is where the parser accuracy option comes into play. Usually you will want this constantly set to 100%, however if you connect to a site and the file that you want doesn’t seem to be in the list, then it may well be worth lowering the accuracy level and checking again. However, anything lower than 50% seems to be illegible and we do not recommend using the 25% unless you do not receive a list of files when you know for certain there are files there.


Proxy Setup

Web Leech 2, as did it’s predecessor, allows you to connect to remote sites through a proxy. However, it is an important point to note that the proxy method used runs only through HTTP proxies and NOT SOCKS proxies. If you are unsure about what method you are using, please contact your systems administrator.


Advanced Options

Web Leech also includes a number of options that were not present in the previous version, these are located on the “Advanced Options” tab of the options screen.

Auto-Update will check for latest version of webleech each time that you run the application. If we find that there is a newer version of the application available then it will be updated automatically for you. Once the update procedure has completed you will need to re-start the application

Auto-Notify differs from the above in that it simply informs you whenever there is a newer version available. It is up to the user to downlad & upgrade as required. If your version is already up-to-date then no message will be displayed.

Cache Size this slider (can be set to 0 if no caching required) will determine how many sites we will cache in the system, the more sites you cache, the more disk space is used. Using the “clear cache” button will remove all currently cached sites.


Connecting to Protected Sites
Connecting to protected sites.

Nowadays more and more sites are using authentication to allow certain users access to special areas of a site. This process, known as Authentication allows the site to make sure that the user accessing the site is a valid user. The previous version of WebLeech was not able to convey the user information to the server and therefore you were not able to “Leech” from protected sites.

This situation has now been rectified, and should you connect to a protected site a dialog-box will appear asking you to specify your username & password for this site. Once you’ve entered these details they will be saved (and encrypted) so that whenever you try to download a file from this site during your session you will not have to enter a password to get each file.


Copying Files Locally

Since we’ve developed an explorer-esque interface to Web Leech 2 it would seem cruel not to allow you to use it as you would explorer. Therefore copying files between local machines is allowed.

Simply drag and drop the files, as you would from a remote site…


Refreshing Data
Refreshing Site Information

Because of the way that we are able to cache information about sites, sometimes we would miss an update to a page’s source. To overcome this you can right-click on the actual site in the site-list and select Refresh.

Once you have done this Web Leech will re-connect to the site and retrieve the latest source.


Browser Sites
Using your Browser’s current site.

One of the new features in WebLeech 2 is the ability to read the currently opened URL from your favourite browser (Only Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer are supported at present.

If you already have a URL opened in any (or both) of these browsers when you start the application, WebLeech will automatically insert these URL’s into the site-list for you. If you want to refresh the opened URL, or want to get the URL from the browser after you’ve started WebLeech then you can right-click on the browser of your choice in the sites window and select “Refresh browser site”.


Troubleshooting

We’ve tried our best to make sure that WebLeech2 is as stable as can be, however, even the most stringent testing cannot account for some of the HTML source that you’ll be parsing.

If you encounter an error whilst using this product then please select the “Report a bug..” from the Help menu, once we have enough of these sites and have found a solution, then an update will be released. However, since this is a FREE product we cannot guarantee that updates will be released and that is why external funding is so important. If you think that you are able to help then please contact sales@voodoo-software.com and we’ll let you know what you can do.

Known Issues

 Wrong site being connected to!

We’re not sure how this is happening, but we have tracked it down to a fault in the Internet control being used, we have email Netmasters about this problem and as soon as they get back to us with a solution we’ll release and update. This happens very rarely and the chances are you’ll never encounter it, but it seems to happen when a server sends a HTTP 403 (Site moved permanently) error.

 Not all of the site’s source is being saved in the cache.

This issue has been resolved in the v2.2 release of WebLeech

 The Auto-Update doesn’t update the application properly.

Sometimes when the Update.exe application is run, WebLeech2 may not have shut-down properly (user may have clicked NO to do you want to quit (usually when a transfer is in progress)). In these situations the update program cannot update your version since you are already running it. If you do not wish to download the application again you can check for a file called WL2xx.EXE (where xx are version & revision) in the application directory. If this file exists then you can double-click on this file and extract the update manually.

 The graphics don’t look so good in 256 colour mode.

We’ve tried to make sure that all the system will work on a majority of PC’s out there, however, for the animated logo we felt that at least 16bit colour was required. If you are in 256 colour mode then the animated logo will not look as good on your machines.

 When I select “Report Bug.. via Email” I get an error from my mail program.

Not all e-mail clients accept the ?subject=  paramater on a mailto: tag. This has been tested with a number of popular e-mail clients and seems to work without a problem. If you do encounter an error here then use the web-based error form at http://voodoo-software.home.ml.org/webleech2/bugs.htm

 I’ve setup a proxy address but I’m not able to connect to a remote site.

This is a very common problem and one which we are waiting on resolving asap. At the moment the control that we are using for internet transfers restricts us to HTTP proxies only. A majority of users are confusing this with SOCKS proxies which will not work. If  you are unsure about your proxy setup then please contact  your systems administrator.

 I selected a region for updates during setup, but now I want to change it.

If you decide to change where you want to download updates from (i.e your particular server may be down), you can do this without having to re-run the setup program. Included in the application directory are three files US_Updates.reg, HM_Updates.reg and UK_Updates.reg. Just double-click on the region you want to use and then re-start WebLeech2 for the changes to take effect.


The WebLeech Sitelist
The WebLeech Site-List.

In order to keep track of which sites you’ve visited, as well as current browser sites, we’ve developed the WebLeech site-list. This is the right-hand window which looks like the tree-view in explorer.

If you successfully connect to a site, it will automatically be added to the site-list, there’s no need for you to do anything. If there is a site there that you do not want to store, then you can right-click on the site and select the “Remove from site history” option. This will make sure that the site is not saved along with the others and it will immediately be removed from the list.

The site-list window also contains a list of drives/directories on your local PC, again, in the same way as you would in the standard windows Explorer, you are able to drag/drop files to drives/directories as well as create directories and the such.