Release Notes for version 1.8.0.9

A major milestone, release 1.8 - code named "Partridges" - is dedicated to crawl performance improvement. Some touches in Usability and User Experience make it also more pleasant to use.

What follows is a fully detailed Release Notes; for more insights about the release please read: Visual SEO Studio 1.8 got fast

New Features:

• Crawl options: number of maximum concurrent connections.
  Available in all crawl option windows (normal crawl, sitemap audit, list of URLs, multi-site crawl), permits to specify the maximum number of threads to use to perform parallel HTTP requests. Current limitations we set are:
  Community Edition:
  • up to 2 (default value) threads
  Professional Edition:
  • Max 32 threads for verified sites (default is 5)
  • Max 5 threads for non-verified (default is 5)
• Custom Filters: new operands for URL property: "Is canonical" and "Is not canonical".

Performance:

• A brand new multi-threaded spider engine, now 2-3 times faster.
  The crawler now makes better use of multi-core architecture and parallel processing. It still remains adaptive avoiding to overload the server, but continually tests the server throughput making a number of concurrent connections and then giving it time to complete them.
  The number of threads set is a maximum number. The program (and the .net framework, and the underlying OS) may limit it based on the number of processors/cores and other evaluations.
• Crawling: Memory check-points management fine-grained.
• Crawl time: improved responsiveness of UI when processing many visual events. The UI is now dramatically less likely to freeze in case of large crawls. The involved visual components - the crawl treeview and the Output window - now update more quickly and smoothly.
• Parsing links now is about 20% faster. The gain during crawl can be of up to 10' for 150K URLs, and a couple of seconds for 500 URLs (it actually all depends on the machine, we took these measures on an old notebook).
• We suppressed a feedback message that carried very little information (and no one probably ever noticed it) and could have been a potential bottleneck in case a long sequence of particular events occurred.

Usability/UX:

• Color scheme changed for some UI elements.
  With 1.7 we addressed some usability issues by evidencing the most important "call to action" buttons, sometimes not noted at first sight by users. We did that by changing their size, and colour. For the latter we used an "acid green" which certainly users did notice - so we improved usability - but would largely find it annoying because too bright. In practice, we increased "Usability" and worsened "User Experience". This new colour scheme corrects the mistake by using a much more pleasant pastel green. Along with it, we changed accordingly the background of the left side "Command pad" panel.
• Report summary pages, now the first column - clickable - is underlined only when the mouse hovers over it.
  This makes the UI appear less clogged, and some users lamented it looked from the '90s.
• End of crawl, summary in Output window no longer can appear intermixed with other messages; it now also is a little more compact.
• "Pro Trial registration" form:
  Layout made prettier and easier to read/understand; action buttons resized and now using new style; better fitting texts; better text box label in error case.
• "Insert activation code" form:
  Layout made prettier, with clearer buttons; UX improved; better textbox label in error case; form not shown in taskbar (uniformed behaviour to other windows).
• Start page, current project name box is now right-aligned with other controls.
• Crawl multi-site window, options hidden in collapsible panel, OK/Cancel buttons enlarged.
• Crawl sitemap window, options hidden in collapsible panel, OK/Cancel buttons enlarged.
• Crawl URL List form: OK/Cancel buttons enlarged.
• Start page: session grid columns width is now fixed and resizable; column "Visited pages" is now right-aligned with some right-padding, columns order and width rearranged.
• Manage Sessions page: column "Visited pages" is now right-aligned with some right-padding, columns order and width rearranged.

Various:

• Textual notations uniformed (various languages).

Fixes:

• Exporting to sitemap could crash if it met a badly formed URL (happened to one user only, it was a very corner-case occurrence).
• XML sitemaps (audit and validation): parsing xml sitemaps when no whitespace separator existed between the url elements skipped every second element.
  Thanks to J.B. for reporting the issue.
• Fixed parsing error of anchor text having nested HTML comments (the comment was previously extracted as part of the anchor text).
• Typos fixed (various languages).