Suggest a Good Website Watcher / Notifier

[dotnina]

I’d like to tell a program "refresh this website every few minutes, and notify me as soon as it’s updated." I currently use Watcher84 for this, but it’s not very robust.

So, does anyone have any recommendations for web page watchers / notifiers? Thanks in advance.

 

[jeremy.king]

A lot of sites nowadays offer syndication using RSS. Do any of the sites you intend to watch offer this? If so, you could look into an aggregator. Personally, I use my.yahoo.com to "read" some of my favorite website content, including this one.

 

[Littleodie914]

Yea, for watching all your favorite RSS sites, I'd highly recommend NewsMac. It has a few preset RSS feeds in it, but you can add your own, organize them, and even put them in a bookmark bar thing like Safari's. It's definitely the best I've used. (And it's free! )

Linkety Link Link

 

[dotnina]

Thanks guys.

Unfortunately, the pages I want to track do not have RSS feeds. I do love RSS, however, and use Newsfire to track feeds.

The sort of thing I’m looking for is something with a simple GUI that will look at a page’s source code every few minutes and determine if the page has been modified. Ideally, the program would display the page and highlight any text that has been added. Not sure how many of these programs exist for the Mac, but Watcher84 can’t be the only one, right?

 

[jeremy.king]

I guess you could always roll your own using cron, wget/curl, and perl.

Needs to be smart enough to ignore advertising however.

Sorry, I have nothing...

 

[madmaxmedia]

NewsFire is really sweet, way better than your generic RSS reader with an Outlook style interface.

I haven't tried other Mac ones yet though (NewsFire is free beta right now, but will be shareware later.)

 

[vertips]

Software to monitor and detect change on web pages

Hi,

I am interested in this topic. I am looking for a software to dectect change on webpages. like check&get or Website-watcher for PC.

Do you know something similar?

Thanks for your anwsers

 

[pjrobertson]

How about a dashboard widget?

Added in Leopard - you can make web snippets with Safari. Then you'd just have to go to the dashboard to check for changes. Still not perfect, but it's an idea.

 

[ShadowSpandex]

If you use firefox you can try the Update Scanner plugin, it hasn't been updated for FF3 yet though.

Or if you want a stand alone program, perhaps Changes Meter will fit the bill.

 

[dirt farmer]

Are you looking for something along the lines of Sunflower?

 

[MacMadHatter]

If you use firefox you can try the Update Scanner plugin, it hasn't been updated for FF3 yet though.

Or if you want a stand alone program, perhaps Changes Meter will fit the bill.

Checked out both this and the Sunflower one, Changes Meter works best, only downside for both is none of them can email you a diff.

 

[notatwork]

Changes Meter works best

I also like Changes Meter...