watchDirectory

Hi, and welcome to the third issue of our watchDirectory announcements newsletter.

Development corner

Since the previous newsletter we released a new Plugin (1, 2, 3... that will be number 10) to automatically unzip files as they arrive. Also, a few additional options are added to the automatically run .bat files plugin, and GIF support to the thumbnail plugin

The Control Center now actually obeys your "check for updates" preference, older versions ignored it when the computer you run the Control Center on had an internet connection. The latest version of the Control Center also has some new menu options to start/stop the wdPostMan program. Furthermore, the actual monitoring program (wdRun) now handles "sharing violations" (a file or directory is locked by someone else) better.

Make sure you are running the latest version: Help -> Check for Updates.

Our aim is to release a new watchDirectory plugin each month, and improve the existing plugins as needed/requested. Plans for the month of September:

• A new plugin to "AutoSort" files to different directories based on their   names (*.jpg to d:\pictures, John*.doc to d:\John\Doc).
• More variables you can use for the Automatically Email plugin.
• The German, and maybe the Dutch, translation of watchDirectory should   be ready.

Tip of the month: chaining tasks

The current version of watchDirectory doesn't allow you to run 2 plugins for one monitoring task. For example, if you want to ZIP the new file before you email it, you may want to configure the Email plugin and the automatically Zip plugin. The easiest way to accomplish this is to configure 2 different tasks:

• One will monitor the "actual" directory where the new files are created.   This task will run the "Automatically ZIP" plugin and write its ZIP files   to another directory (C:\Zipped).
• The other task monitors the "output directory" of the ZIP plugin, and   emails those ZIP files.

You can also add a third task that will "automatically delete" the ZIP files after 30 minutes, by using the scheduler of the Professional edition.

The tools WE use

If you visited the www.watchdirectory.net website recently, you may have encountered a few strange looking pages, or even "missing pages" and pictures. Now I know I *should* be checking my website logs and html to prevent these kind of errors, but priorities (and the lack of 223 hours in a day - sounds familiar?) prevented me from doing that.

A guy I know who eats HTML for breakfast helped me out recently, and also has an online HTML checker that you can enter the URL of your own website. So go ahead and enter your website's URL and see what happens.

Until the end of September 2005, you can order the standard or even more powerful professional edition of HTMLValidator and save a little (20%). Just order it from http://store.eSellerate.net/s.asp?s=STR114898436&coupon=<<<only for subscribers>>>

My 5 minutes of fame (please skip)

Besides watchDirectory, which is developed with the programming language C++, I do a lot of custom development using the Java language. Still not sure which of those languages I like better, however as several customers requested other "scripting languages" than batch files, it seems natural to me to have a Java plugin. Other scripting languages, like PHP and Perl are also "on the horizon", but are lower priority (as I don't "speak" PHP or Pearl - time, time, time...). You can expect the Java plugin somewhere by the end of this year.

Speak to you again next month,

Gert,
Developer & Support guru