how to monitor a website for changes? (moving from WebMon to web-based service)

[brotherS]

Hi,

in the past I used WebMon (http://www.markwell.btinternet.co.uk/webmon/) to monitor some websites/pages for news and updates. Now I'm looking for a free service that does that (almost) in real time - once a day is not enough - and sends me an email if there's an update. I'm willing to accept ads in that email, and I only need one page to be monitored.

Is there any such service that doesn't just report once a day? Thanks in advance!

[Paul Keith]

Edit: Btw the below service doesn't provide send to e-mail support

I still haven't checked the firefox extension sitedelta but you could reduce the monitoring time in page monitor (for Google Chrome)

The downside is that it's probably not as intelligent as Webmon for dodging update changes to the most minute of things like date changes. This especially holds true if you are going to reduce the update checker to within minutes.

You may probably be better off looking for a page2rss -> rss2e-mail type of service but I have no personal experience with any of those.

[skwire]

in the past I used WebMon (http://www.markwell.btinternet.co.uk/webmon/) to monitor some websites/pages for news and updates. Now I'm looking for a free service that does that (almost) in real time - once a day is not enough - and sends me an email if there's an update.

According to the WebMon screenshot, you can set the update-check interval to as little as one minute.  Also, according to the feature list, you can "run other programs when updates are found."  That other program could be a command-line emailer such as Blat...so you could email yourself.  Make sense?

[superboyac]

I don't know of any free software that does it.  But I'd highly recommend using website watcher, which can do pretty much anything.  It's pretty amazing.

[daddydave]

Isn't this the problem for which RSS feeds were invented? I guess there's a few web sites still not on board.

[brotherS]

Yeah, an RSS feed would be perfect for this task...

If possible, I want to move to a web-based service so that I don't have to run yet another program locally.

[Ampa]

How about a service like Page2RSS - monitors a webpage and creates an RSS feed to report changes.

[daddydave]

Oh, I didn't think of this earlier, Google Reader has a fairly new feature that autogenerates RSS feeds for sites that don't have them. Try just putting in the URL for the web site where it is expecting an RSS URL if you use Google Reader. It works pretty well in my experience (hn.com for example). It also helps if there is a mobile version of the site to point it to.

[tomos]

Oh, I didn't think of this earlier, Google Reader has a fairly new feature that autogenerates RSS feeds for sites that don't have them. Try just putting in the URL for the web site where it is expecting an RSS URL if you use Google Reader. It works pretty well in my experience (hn.com for example). It also helps if there is a mobile version of the site to point it to.

thanks for that tip

[brotherS]

Page2RSS looks nice, and I like the Google Reader feature, but how do I most easily turn that into an email in my inbox (telling me about an update on that site)? 

[Paul Keith]

Free version can only allow for 5 feeds:

http://www.feedmyinbox.com/

Note, I didn't verify this application - this is just the top search on Delicious.com

Edit: Nevermind, I don't know how Delicious ranks their items by default.

[brotherS]

Wow, that looks perfect! I'll try it.

Edit: Now I looked at http://www.feedmyinbox.com/pricing/ - and it looks like it's only one update per day (not as it happens) if you don't want to pay :-(

[Paul Keith]

Sorry, I should have checked before I posted it. Unfortunately that's pretty much all the services I can find.

They all mostly are appealing to RSS to newsletters so the type of real time e-mailing is not available. It might be better if you directly contact all freeware website watchers and suggest something like this to them.

[brotherS]

No need to be sorry, at least that service sends the news that were posted on the page I'm monitoring in the email, I like that.