Keeping up to date with a site that doesn’t offer some sort of notification system can be a real pain. While a lot of blogs and news sites will offer feeds and/or email notifications, the majority of sites still do not.
For both home and work use I’m trying to turn up a useful way to monitor sites for changes. When changes are found, notify me. Perhaps even allow me to mark areas of the page to ignore (for instance, if the page shows current time don’t notify me every 1 minute!).
I’ve found some decent looking programs — for instance, UpdatePatrol looks like it’d do the job — I just can’t seem to find any web based options. Seems like I’ve seen some in the past, but I guess my google-foo is weak tonight.
Surely, in this web 2.0 world there must be a web based option, right? Or how about an option I can use from Linux?
What do you folks use to track pages that don’t offer feeds? Any suggestions?
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June 26th, 2007 
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http://techfoolery.com/archives/2006/08/23/0634/
There’s your answer…5 different ways
Perhaps ChangeDetection.com may be a solution. I briefly used it to get updates for a site, until it mystriously closed (it was a good site too).
Michael and Vox – you guys rock! Thanks so much for the links. Now I have options to research.
changenotes.com is good. I use that one
And we expect reviews of them all, Handy
Thanks ReviewSaurus, I’ll add that one to the list.
Vox, sometimes life is full of disappointments… but I’ll definitely try to follow-up!
Does that mean that Forrest some times gets cockroaches in his box of chocolates?
Come on, you know I don’t do W2.0 stuff, so…I’m curious if any of that stuff is worth using lol!
You could try watchthatpage.com. I use it a little. The jury’s still out though, since it keeps telling me that a particular forum page is updated, even though I can’t see any changes.
Thank you, GTD-W — I’ll add that one to the list of sites to try. So far, my testing has been… disappointing. :-\ But I’m sure there’s a decent solution out there.
If not, well… we’ll write one I suppose.
[...] Ideas? Tracking Updates on Web Pages [...]
[...] – and boy, I’m glad I never wrote that “site change tracking app” that I had considered a while back. […] most useful if you want to be alerted whenever a specific page has been updated. For [...]