Freezing During Web Page Capture

[J-Mac]

Earlier today I ran into a little problem with UR. I had attempted to capture a web page, a software purchase receipt on the Digital River web site. Running Windows XP Pro and browsing with Firefox 3, I clicked on the "Copy to Ultra Recall" Firefox extension button, but the telltale "ding" wave file that signifies a completed capture never played. I opened the UR window to see if perhaps I had just missed the alert and it was apparently still in capture mode: a new child in the "Imported Items" folder showed the Digital River page title and icon, but the Detail page was blank and the cursor was an hourglass. I decided to leave it alone for a minute or two to give it more time, but then my machine started slowing down quite a bit.

The Windows Task Manager showed two entries for UR as "Not Responding": one was UR and the other was explorer.exe, as is usually the case when an application stops responding in Windows. But the CPU usage was annoying so I decided to abandon that capture - figured I would capture it with something else. But I could not stop it, could not selete the item. Also could not close UR - even End Process in the Task Manager would not work. I finally opened another utility I have that permits me to kill any running process and shut UR with it.

I reopened UR and naturally clicked on that item to see if anything at all was captured, and then to delete the child item. Same problem - hourglass, stops responding, had to kill it the same way. Happened twice more before I just deleted the item without first trying to look at the detail pane. I had really wanted to see if that gave any hints as to what happened. But I gave up.

Since then UR has been working normally. Has anyone seen this or something similar?

Thanks!

Jim

[dasymington]

I think I've seen something like that when trying to capture purchase receipts from the web. Even it it doesn't hang, it usually won't capture the receipt because, I think, UR runs the URL again when capturing and on a secure site that won't produce the receipt again.

For purchase receipts I usually select the whole page and then click the Copy to Ultra Recall button. That works most times.

[kinook]

If it happens again, please ZIP and send the .urd file with the problem item to support@kinook.com (or right-click the item and copy/paste into a new database and ZIP and send that database). Thanks.

[J-Mac]

Originally posted by dasymington
I think I've seen something like that when trying to capture purchase receipts from the web. Even it it doesn't hang, it usually won't capture the receipt because, I think, UR runs the URL again when capturing and on a secure site that won't produce the receipt again.

For purchase receipts I usually select the whole page and then click the Copy to Ultra Recall button. That works most times.

I also use Aignes Local Website Archive and it also runs the URL again when using Firefox, but there is another method I can select to grab it anyway. In IE, however, LWA grabs all of them. Either way it has never frozen up like UR did on this occasion.

I agree that highlighting and copying would probably do it.

Thanks!

Jim

[J-Mac]

Originally posted by kinook
If it happens again, please ZIP and send the .urd file with the problem item to support@kinook.com (or right-click the item and copy/paste into a new database and ZIP and send that database). Thanks.

Will do, Kinook. Do you mean to do that immediately after the freeze-up? Or during it, zipping a copy of the URD in Explorer?

Thanks!

Jim

[kinook]

Afterwards, if there is an item for the import (which there appeared to be in this case, based on your description).

[J-Mac]

Originally posted by kinook
Afterwards, if there is an item for the import (which there appeared to be in this case, based on your description).

Guess what? UR is locked up right now - again! Same page is doing it.

I was going through my various folders in my URD, trying to plan a little organization in it when I noticed the "Recycle Bin" at the bottom of the tree in the Data Expolrer pane. I hadn't noticed it before since it is normally out of sight. So I opened up the Recycle Bin to see how much I had already accumulated there, and I was scrolling through the items to make sure I wanted to permanently delete them and I forgot all about that RegNow page that had froze up UR. When I scrolled to that item the page is blank and the hourglass appeared. It has been like that for about 15 minutes now.

So let me get myself clear as to exactly what you want:

A copy of that entire URD, zipped and emailed to you? If that is it, this does have some personal information in it, causing me a little concern.

Let me know.

Thanks!

Jim

Edit: Whoa!! Hold on there, Babalooey! It just stopped and the RegNow page is now there - in my UR Database! OK, it's in the Recycle Bin but I can move that. Took less time this time - the page originally had UR locked up for a good 20 minutes or more before I dumped it. Plus I tried to look at it three more times and it locked up each of those times, too. This time it was only locked for about 20 minutes total and then the page appeared. It must have shown up while I was typing the first part of this post.

In your opinion, will the UR-stored page take that long to load every time I click on it? Or will it be immediately available each time now that it is completely in there? (I performed a "Copy", not a "Link" with the Firefox 3 extension when I captured the page.

Thanks!

[kinook]

It's hard to say what is making it slow. What you can do is right-click on the problem item and copy, then create a new database (File | New) and paste it into the new database. Then ZIP and send that database and the info from Help | About | Install Info to support@kinook.com. Thanks.

[J-Mac]

OK, I'll send that your way.

FYI, the page takes 15 minutes plus now every time you try to view it. Nothing unusual on there. Can't believe it polls the web for a new view of the page each time. That would make no sense at all, as what I want to see is what the page looked like at the moment I captured it!

Jim

[J-Mac]

Originally posted by kinook
It's hard to say what is making it slow. What you can do is right-click on the problem item and copy, then create a new database (File | New) and paste it into the new database. Then ZIP and send that database and the info from Help | About | Install Info to support@kinook.com. Thanks.

OK, two copy modes: "Copy" and "Copy With URL". Which do you want me to send?

[kinook]

Either. Then in the new database, right-click in the Data Explorer pane on the My Data item and choose Paste (not Paste Special).

[J-Mac]

Originally posted by kinook
Either. Then in the new database, right-click in the Data Explorer pane on the My Data item and choose Paste (not Paste Special).

Done.

Jim

[kinook]

UR did successfully capture the page and store it. UR uses an embedded instance of IE for displaying web pages, and testing Win XP3 w/ IE6 and Vista w/ IE7, both embedded and non-embedded IE takes 20 seconds to render that page.

Firefox (Item | Show Explorer Menu -> Open With -> Firefox if it's not the default browser) displays it immediately. There doesn't seem be anything wrong with the page itself and it is stored locally (there are some external references on the page, but removing them doesn't speed up IE's rendering, so I don't think the delay is caused by accessing something online).

You'll probably just want to avoid viewing that item too often.

[J-Mac]

Originally posted by kinook
UR did successfully capture the page and store it. UR uses an embedded instance of IE for displaying web pages, and testing Win XP3 w/ IE6 and Vista w/ IE7, both embedded and non-embedded IE takes 20 seconds to render that page.

Firefox (Item | Show Explorer Menu -> Open With -> Firefox if it's not the default browser) displays it immediately. There doesn't seem be anything wrong with the page itself and it is stored locally (there are some external references on the page, but removing them doesn't speed up IE's rendering, so I don't think the delay is caused by accessing something online).

You'll probably just want to avoid viewing that item too often.

I don't understand most of what you are saying here.

It was captured from Firefox 3, which IS my default browser. And UR is NOT taking 20 seconds to display the page. It is taking about 60 times that.

Is UR accessing something online? Maybe it is just me, but your answer to that is not clear at all.

No reason known as to why this freezes UR and makes it unusable for all that time?

Jim

[kinook]

UR uses Internet Explorer to display web pages. IE is very slow in rendering this page. I'm not sure why (ask Microsoft).

Some options:

1) Don't use IE to display web pages in UR. Remove .htm;.html from 'Tools | Options | Browser | File extensions to display in internal browser view', and view externally in Firefox (Item | Open Document or Ctrl+J).

2) Edit the stored web page to remove the code that is causing IE to render it slowly. To do this with Notepad:
a) Select Item | Show Explorer Menu on the menu, choose Open With -> Notepad (you may need to Choose Program and browse to C:\Windows\System32\Notepad.exe)
b) Remove

<LINK
href="RegNow Order Form_files/12159.css" type=text/css rel=styleSheet>

from the file (starting on the fifth line).
c) Save the file
d) In UR click 'Click here to resume internal editing' to sync the changes into UR and view internally.

[J-Mac]

Ahh - much better! OK, I didn't bother with the change to view in Firefox externally - I don't want to have UR have to open a browser externally for me to view anything; that defeates the purpose of storing it in UR.

But I did edit that line of HTML out of the page source and it loads instantly now! How did you manage to determine that line was the offending code?

Anyway, I had kind of solved the problem another way. When the page finally rendered the last time I just copied all and pasted it to a text document in Notes. That pretty much accomplished what I needed: A view of the page as it had looked when I made the purchase.

But fixing the code has now worked also.

One more question, though this may not be the place to ask it. If you feel it belongs in a separate thread let me know.

When I want a copy of a web page, 99% of the time I do not need nor want the actual web page, still connected to all the links on it, etc. I mostly just need a view of the page with the visual elements intact. By that I mean each image showing but each still a separate image. Ultra Recall, along with most web page archive applications, seem to go back and grab the page independently from the web, which can obviously cause me to also get any bad coding, as you pointed out on this RegNow page. Also, Local Website Archive (LWA) - which I used for archiving web pages prior to getting UR - does the same thing. This makes it difficult to capture a lot of secure pages, since the program goes to the web and attempts to load the same URL but without having the logon credentials. Also, in Firefox I often like to remove any offending visual page elements, such as frames containing flash ads, etc. Yet since UR and LWA go out and fetch the page in IE using the URL they usually pick up all the junk I have removed from the page in Firefox, either with Web Developer or Ad Block Plus.

Is there any chance that we could see a feature or option in UR that will allow the capture of a page exactly as we are viewing it in Firefox? Basically a screen scrape?

Thank you.

Jim

[kinook]

Select part or all (Ctrl+A) of the web page in Firefox, then copy and paste into UR (or use the global import hotkey [default is Win+V -- Tools | Options | Import | Insert clipboard contents hotkey] after copying). This will import the page as provided on the clipboard by the browser instead of retrieving it again online.