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Author Topic: Pre-review discussion of Best Website Change Monitor  (Read 71736 times)

mouser

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Pre-review discussion of Best Website Change Monitor
« on: March 29, 2005, 12:14 PM »
This saturday's award will be for best Website Change Monitoring tool.
There are several of these such programs available, and some free ones as well.

here's a good page of some:
shareware -> http://www.snapfiles...isctools/swmoni.html
freeware -> http://www.snapfiles...isctools/fwmoni.html
(now you know why SnapFiles is on our links page as one of the best software search sites)


ok so, keeping with the plans for ASRT, what would be nice is some replies in the next week on the following kinds of subjects:
1) if you found a program that falls into this category that looks especially good, post a link to it
2) post features you think are important for this category
3) post information about how you think a particular app stacks up against others, and how it stacks up using the features suggested by you or others
what features are lacking, which are good, etc.

IMPORTANT:
[ edited - i've edited this post and removed my current expected winner  until we decide whether announcing the candidate winner selected by reviewer should be public ]

DISCLAIMER:
i know this category quite well and prior to our collective decision here to get group participation in the reviews, i made a preliminary choice of the winner of this category and contacted the author about offering a discount to our members, under the same conditions as our other discounts (ie absolutely no commission or payment to this site, all discount goes to users).  this decision is not final, but i thought it was worth mentioning.  however, your views and opinions and feature lists would still be incredibly helpful in writing a comprehensive review, and there is always the issue of awarding a freeware alternative, etc.  and the discussion about best program will, as we discussed earlier, be a useful record for others to read along with the award.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2005, 07:08 AM by mouser »

Jibz

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Re: Pre-review discussion of Best Website Change Monitor
« Reply #1 on: March 30, 2005, 07:22 AM »
Let me kick this one off with one feature I think is essential to such a tool -- the ability to filter page contents to discard or pay special attention to certain information :up:.

Some of these apps simply check the time stamp on the html file, or some crc value of the contents, which is not very useful for dynamic pages.

Take for instance a page with a visitor counter somewhere, "1,234,567 visitors since January 1st, 1978" -- if the tool does not offer the possibility to filter that out, the page will appear to be updated on every check.

mouser

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Re: Pre-review discussion of Best Website Change Monitor
« Reply #2 on: April 02, 2005, 11:20 AM »
agreed 100%.
i was surprised at how many tools do not have good support for this.


THIS THREAD IS NOW CLOSED AND LOCKED,
because the review is finished and the award was given out.