Filed under: Utilities, Features, Web services
10 free ways to keep track of changes to any website, without an RSS reader
That's where site monitoring services come in. Sure, it might be a little 2005, but it can still help you get the concert tickets you want as soon as they go on sale. Here are 10 alternative ways to track changes to a website. They're all free, and they all work whether the site you're monitoring has an RSS feed or not.
Check4Change
If you're running Firefox, you can install this add-on to periodically check a website for changes. The frequency of the checks is up to you. The major problem with Check4Change is that you have to keep the site you want to monitor open in your browser. You can tell Check4Change to use a pop-up, or an alert sound to notify you, or just bring the browser window to the front.
Update Scanner
Update Scanner is a competing Firefox option that places an icon in the status bar. Click to pop up a panel listing all the sites you're monitoring, so you can visit the sites, manually check them for changes, or set preferences. Update Scanner checks once a day by default, but you can set an interval as short as 5 minutes.
Changedetection.com is a web-based service that monitors any URL you give it, and sends updates to an email address you specify. New text is highlighted, and old text is struck through, making it easy to see what's changed and what used to be there. Changedetection.com is perhaps the oldest option on this list. It started in 1999.
WatchThatPage
Watch that page is another web-based product, similar to Changedetection.com. It adds the option of viewing site changes on the web instead of receiving updates by email.
Google Reader (now with custom feeds!)
Now that Google Reader has added custom feeds, you can subscribe to a site's updates even if it doesn't have RSS feeds set up. This works more like a change-tracking service than a traditional RSS subscription, so I thought it was worth putting on the list.
Here's a Windows desktop option for watching webpages. You can monitor multiple URLs in the same window, and quickly get a heads-up on any changes without using email. Changes are viewable from within the app, and you can see when URLy Warning last checked each URL.
WebMon
Another Windows site checker. The advantage of WebMon is that you can specify which elements of a website you want to monitor, which keeps your from getting alerts for changes you don't care about. Just go to "specify content to check," and paste in the HTML from the part of the website you'd like to monitor.
Changes Meter
Changes Meter is an OS X desktop option for monitoring websites. Unlike the Windows apps I just mentioned, it doesn't show you the specific changes to the sites you choose. It does tell you when they're updated, though, which might be good enough when you're talking about eBay options or the latest update to the Apple Store. It's also compatible with Growl, so you can get a pop-up alert as soon as a change occurs.
ChangeAlarm
ChangeAlarm is another web-based option, but it's geared toward webmasters. You can add a Change Alarm widget to your site, allowing users to sign up for email updates that let them know when you make changes. Personally, I'd rather just offer RSS feeds, but this might be a good option if you have a significant number of visitors who don't use RSS.
Page2RSS plus FeedMyInbox
Page2RSS creates an RSS feed of changes to a webpage, and FeedMyInbox lets you skip the RSS reader and get updates by email instead. Together, they make a pretty decent page-monitoring solution. This won't work for a lot of pages at once, though, because FeedMyInbox is limited to 5 feeds per free account.
Chromatic is one of the best time-wasters I've recently come across. It's all about the gameplay -- no Flash graphics here. You play a "circle" (it doesn't really have a name in the game). You move around with the arrow keys, and you change colors with Z, X, and C.
You can either be red, blue, or yellow, and you can switch at any time during the game. Each color has different capabilities -- yellow can double-jump, while red has a longer dash (which is like a forward sprint, activated by double-pressing DOWN).
Each ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Bryan Price said 7:52PM on 2-08-2010
I've tried page2rss. It generates advertising links as well, and it's all Viagra and Cialis. I tried to use Google's Greader for the same page, and THEY do the same thing. It might be one thing if there was something about the page that might lead one to doing that, but I've looked at the source, and it's clean. I understand that they need to make some kind of money, but that's not related stuff, that's just spam.
Reply
Bryan Price said 8:16PM on 2-08-2010
OK, WTF is going on with that website? I downloaded the url with wget. http://www.dunenovels.com/novels
That's nothing but a spam page. Is the site owner deliberately doing that based on user agent? Man, I just used UserAgent on Firefox. I get the spam page. Hell, Google indexes the spam page. http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:WxCsE2pwFRYJ:www.dunenovels.com/+site:dunenovels.com&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
I've left a message using their contact form.
I guess I'll be retrying those two methods again on something that hasn't been hacked. :|
Reply
NyaR said 9:25PM on 2-08-2010
http://sucuri.net
Reply
dd said 7:49PM on 2-11-2010
++ for http://sucuri.net ...
Reply
Tom Carnell said 7:06AM on 2-15-2010
Hi - Femtoo - (http://femtoo.com) has been able to do this for some months now. But Femtoo also has these key features:
- Monitor particular parts of a page
- Parse data and check for particular conditions (share price hit a certain amount etc)
- Premium accounts can create 'low latency' trackers for critical monitoring applications
- Receive notifications via email, Instant Messenger and soon SMS (I think)
- Add a 'widget' to any page to allow people to 'subscribe' to a 'tracker'
- It uses the amazing cQuery (http://cquery.com) Server-side CSS Content Selection Engine
- You can publish 'trackers' to the 'Tracker Library' and anybody can subscribe
Reply
metalcesare said 4:55PM on 4-06-2010
Try Check & Get (http://activeurls.com/)
You can look at older snapshots, search the content of web pages (has regex IIRC) and do actions (like sending mails, execute a command, etc) when it founds an occurrence.
Reply