Mozenda's latest release (2.3.379) is now available for download. Below are a few highlighted improvements. For a full list, see the release notes forum post.
Keyboard shortcuts
For heavy Mozenda users, we think the new keyboard shortcuts will be very helpful. See the release notes in the forum for a list, or download this cheat sheet (PDF) for your convenience.
MozendaShortcutsHelp.pdf (41.21 kb)
Page count estimator
Ever wonder how many pages a particular agent is using? Well, now when you test an agent, a page counter will show you in real time how many page requests the agent is making. Note that this estimate is approximate and does not take into account anonymous pages nor image/file rates.
Auto-save to the rescue
We all forget to hit save sometimes. Every couple of seconds, Mozenda's Agent Builder will save the current agent being edited. In a situation where the builder is closed inadvertently or unexpectedly, you will be prompted to reopen that same agent when you open the Agent Builder again.
See more details on these and other new features and fixes here.
We've made some helpful improvements to the Mozenda Web Console. Enjoy!
Icons!
The Agents page in the Web Console now shows a few helpful icons.
Here's the icon key (they also have tooltips):
Scheduled - This agent will run on a schedule.
Publish - This agent has publishing configured.
Anonymous - This agent has been configured to run anonymously.
Required Anonymous - This agent is required to run anonymously.
Configure multiple agents at once
You can now configure Agent Preferences for multiple agents simultaneously--all without leaving the the agent list in the Web Console. Just select one or more agents from the Agent list page, and configure your agent preferences from the More Actions folder. Each checkbox can be checked (applies to all selected agents), filled (applies to some selected agents), or empty (does not apply to any selected agents), as seen below:
Account-level anonymous management
On your Account page in the Web Console, you can manage which agents will run anonymously (including an option to run everything anonymously). Here are some of the benefits of running agents anonymously.
If you haven't heard, it's been a busy weekend for both online and brick-and-mortar retailers. In fact, over this last weekend, shoppers spent a record $52.5 billion. Ecommerce ate up a larger piece of the pie than ever before, and that's not even including numbers from today, Cyber Monday.
(Source: BigResearch report, NRF)
We've seen some innovative uses of Mozenda from both shoppers and store owners, from complex price comparison mashups to simple threshold notifications. No matter your role, there is an explosion of valuable data put out on the web around this time of year, and your ability to harness that data can make all the difference.
Just as a quick example of how easy it is to grab some of the data you're looking for, here's a 3-minute video showing a start-to-finish scrape of Apple accessories product info:
We proudly give you our best version of Mozenda yet. You asked, and we listened. So without further ado, here's a rundown of our recently released features. Enjoy!
Capacity, capacity, capacity
Here at Mozenda, we just threw open the floodgates. Before now, some scraping jobs may have been queued on high-volume, high-traffic sites. Now you can assign and run several agents at the same time on those types of websites. Go ahead, have at it.
Load a page, any page
The new load page action lets you load any webpage from anywhere within an agent. For example, in the middle of an agent, you might need to load a web page without using a Click Item action. Now you can just insert a Load Page action and specify a URL. This can be helpful when, for instance, you need to be logged in to a website before your agent can perform subsequent actions.
To scrape, or not to scrape -- Anonymous
Although running agents using anonymous proxies isn't new to some Mozenda users, we thought we'd let you know how recent improvements in our anonymous data extraction can affect your web scraping capabilities. See details.
More value from your values
Now you can use the values that you've captured as variables in your agent. You can use these variables to set a user input, addend a URL, load a page (see previous paragraph), etc.
All together now
We're really excited about our new image/file publishing capabilities. If you build an agent that downloads files or images, then you will see a new checkbox (see image below) in the Publish dialogue that says, "Publish image and file packages". If you check this box, all images (for the view you select) will be published along with your data, on the schedule that you choose.
Takes all kinds
Mozenda will now automatically detect which version of Internet Explorer your Windows machine is running (typically 7 or 8). Once the version is determined, Mozenda will designate a server that is optimized for your individual scraping needs.
I think I hear my API calling
We've introduced a whole slew of useful new API calls. Click here to see expanded details. You can also learn more about these on the API documentation page.
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