Category Archives: Reviews

A Review of Web Site Change Detection Services

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Update: So Gary Price at Search Engine Watch has given this article huge link love, and that’s probably why you’re here. I’ll be posting an interview I did with Gary later today (1/4) over at the blog of Net Squared. We talked about the same subject of this post, as well as RSS, teaching search and how ResourceShelf is maintained.

Ok, so every once in awhile I come upon a web page that 1. doesn’t change very often 2. doesn’t offer an RSS feed and 3. I want notification from any time the page changes. Most recently this has been like pages that say “this service is not accepting new accounts right now. we hope to reopen the service to new accounts when we get more servers.” Or, some time ago I was hired by someone concerned about the expansion of a nationwide retailer competing with them and I wanted to know of any little change made to the company’s List of Stores around the country. All too often I find press releases or calender entries on sites that have no RSS feeds and bad link structure, and are thus unscrapable by FeedFire.com. The following works for things like that too.

So, what can you do in such circumstances? You can set up an account with a web site monitoring service. But which one should you use? I found the following via the excellent site Fagan Finder’s URL Info, a boatload of site analysis tools.

Watch That Page
ChangeDetection
ChangeNotes
TrackEngine

Here’s my reviews:

Watch That Page
Offers email notification of changes that have occurred, will send changed text itself or notify you of broken pages. Can be sent daily or weekly at a set time. Offers a bookmarklet you can click on to add any page to your list of pages monitored. Will filter for certain words, but appears to only work across all pages or none, not for particular pages. Basic use is free, but they ask for a $20 donation for priority and professional use. No native support for RSS, but if you could use the following options: 1. an email to receive the notifications that offers RSS feeds of the inbox (GMail does this) or 2. Have the notifications sent to MailFeed. I know that RSS is the only way I’d want to receive any substantial number of these notifications!

So the good news about WatchThatPage is that it will send you the actual text that has changed. This is a widely used service that seems pretty darned reliable.

ChangeDetection

This site is old-school. It only notifies you that things have changed instead of delivering the change to you. It’s targeted towards web masters who want to add a “get email when this page changes” button on one of their pages. Don’t do that. You can do the same thing and lots more with WatchThatPage.

The one advantage to this is that it is very, very easy to use. You don’t have to create an account. You just tell it what URL you want monitored and what email to send notification of any changes to. This could make it nice for some purposes, and I have used it when I was too lazy to go to the trouble of signing in to other services that I forget my username and pw for. But I always end up unsatisfied that I’m not told what it is on a page that has changed.

ChangeNotes

This service does send the actual changed text, which is key. There is a bookmarklet here too. Registration is very, very easy. Just an email and a new password twice. There is also an interesting feature that supports customization for sending change notification to email lists! While I don’t encourage the use of email lists (RSS is way better) it’s a fact of life that many people still use them. After giving it a close look for the first time in awhile, I think this is a really good service.

TrackEngine

Bookmarklet, keyword inclusion and exclusion filtering and best of all – the whole page sent to you with the changed content highlighted in color! Nice! Other options are available too. This is by far the most professional looking service of those reviewed here. A free account is limited to monitoring 5 pages and only checks once per day at most. Now I got pretty excited when I saw that hourly checking for changes was an option. Then I saw that hourly checks were an option for paid users. Then I found out that “Hourly Watch Packages being launched soon – SPECIAL Promotions for folks who express their interest before the launch. Do so now (link to email).” And guess what? That’s what this page on the site said 3 years ago! The wonderful Internet Archive is made for checking up on claims like this (“coming soon!”).

One way or the other, I think TrackEngine still looks like one of the best services available if there are very few pages you anticipate tracking. The color coded highlighting of changes is pretty hard to resist!

Conclusion: Here’s what I’d do. If I was only very rarely finding a page that I really wanted to track changes to, and that is the case for me, then I’d probably sign up with TrackEngine. But both ChangeNotes and WatchThatPage are pretty fair options, and are a better idea if you might end up tracking more than 5 pages. For some of my clients I’m going to subscribe to, for example, antiquated events calenders that don’t have RSS feeds, have the change notification sent to MailFeed and then plop that feed in with the other feeds I’m subscribed to.

Final note: Bandwidth, storage, computing power – these are all things that are way cheaper today than they were 3 to 5 years ago when these services were the hot new thing. The technological changes have opened up a world of possibilities – that’s a big part of Web 2.0. So why, oh why then is no one offering me a service that checks hourly for changes to a web page? I’ve been told by some folks that anything online that’s worth looking at has an RSS feed now. I don’t agree, though I understand the cynicism.

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MP3Blogs and Playing Sound From Inside Your Site

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Here’s an intro to the wacky world of MP3 Blogs and info on how YOU can have one-click audio played from right inside your blog or website. Woo hoo! Want to tell people about a cool podcast? Or a nifty song? You can make it easy for them to listen with this tool described below.

So it’s been a pretty busy day so far for me, but not as busy as these folks! The coolest thing I’ve found online today has been this awesome 1975 musical performance titled “Postal Workers Canceling Stamps At The University Of Ghana Post Office.” Give the little play button a click and check it out as you read the rest of this post!

Postal Workers Canceling Stamps At The University Of Ghana Post Office

Isn’t that awesome! I found it via on one of many MP3 Blogs now available online, this one called Aurgasm. The post for this song itself, with comments etc. is here.

Other MP3 Blogs I’ve found (via my awesome brother Tom) include The Hype Machine and Elbo.ws but there are lots and lots online. Del.icio.us contains 607 items tagged “mp3blog,” though at least some of them are probably directories of mp3blogs. The most popular items in that tag space are here and include The Hype Machine, Aurgasm (so my brother knows what’s hot) as well as sites like 3Hive (looks very cool) and music.for-robots.com.

These sites are on less that fully solid legal ground, but they are pretty darned cool if you ask me. Standard practices include posting links after every song to buy the album from the artist, a message on the sidebar urging you to pay for music at least some of the time and a note to anyone who owns copyrights on any of the music posted saying “just let me know if you want me to take your song down and down it will come – no problem.”

Snip… out goes the discussion of competing theories of intellectual property rights.

Anyway! So you might be wondering, “how do these sites put little play buttons that enable me to play these files without leaving the page?” Like these:

Rhythm’N’Brass by The Special Guests
Via 3Hive

Galaxies, by Laura Veirs (very beautiful song!)

Via music.for-robots.com

I don’t even have these songs on my server! And you can listen to them without leaving my site – wow!

How did I do it? Hours of painful toil! No, it wasn’t that hard actually. I just viewed the source code of the Aurgasm buttons, copied and pasted them into my blog post here, and changed the URL of the song being pointed at. Wow! It’s all made possible via Fabricio Zuardi and Andre Cardozo’s awesome open source XSPF Web Music Player. To learn more about this rad tool, check out this page and this page, both on the open source community site Sourceforge.

You don’t need to know about that stuff though just to use the tool. I am going to try to figure out how to make a bookmarklet for this code, but I don’t have time right now. But you can copy and paste the code from my site, replace the parts here with the mp3 filename you want to play and the title, and paste it into your own site.

It’s taking me too long to make the code appear as code in this blog post, so just go up to your browser’s View menu and “view source code” for this page. I’ll surround the code you want with asterisks and you can copy and paste it into your own blog posts or site.

Just look at the letters and symbols right around the file URL real close before you paste over them. You can do this! It’s not really very hard. Feedback: My brother just emailed and reminded me that it would be a good idea to include a direct link to the file that this tool streams, so folks can download it too.

Does this have you totally pumped up or what? (I’m stoked.) Well here’s something else to listen to, my Net Squared coworker Britt Bravo explaining how volunteers can plug in to the Net Squared community. Maybe your enthusiasm will spill over and you’ll go profile a non-profit group or two.

Britt Bravo on how you can help Net Squared (6 mins)

While you listen, here’s Britt’s blogs at NetSquared and at her Big Vision Career and Project Consulting.

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Four Visitor Mapping Services Compared

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Visitors to this and many other blogs may have noticed the proliferation of maps used to visualize the geographic location of a site’s readers. I use Clustrmaps myself and recommend it to others in most situations. But there are alternatives, and each service probably makes sense in different circumstances. Here’s an overview of 4 of the most popular visitor map services I’ve come across online. People love maps on blogs. Love them.

  • Clustrmaps.com shows a nice looking map on your site’s front page, with red circles of varying size to indicate how many visitors have come from each location. You can click on the map to get a full page view. Paid subscribers can focus in one particular continents and have the Adsense removed from the top of the full page maps. Subscription is aprox. $10 per year. The maps can also be set to go blank and begin anew at intervals of your choice. These folks also have awesome customer service. I believe this map is good for sites wishing to demonstrate world-wide readership, but for which networking is less important than it is for business type sites. I’ve set one up, for example, at The Committee to Protect Bloggers. Much of the blogging there concerns the Middle East and Asia, so it’s interesting to compare subject matter and location of readership. Their map shows that there are many readers living in the areas written about.
  • Frappr is a very full featured service. In addition to a scrollable Google mini-map on your site, there’s a click through full screen with extensive fields for community networking. In addition to posting photos, messages and links to the Google Maps used by Frappr, visitors can also send private messages to the site admin. Frappr asks visitors for their zip code and posts flags on the map accordingly. Users (“members”) can subscribe to email updates of new items posted to a map, admin can set up a slide-show of recently added photos, and who knows what else can be done with this amazing service. It appears to be supported by AdSense and AdBright. We’ll see how this service holds up under heavy adoption. You can browse a list of maps in use at the homepage of Frappr. This is a very impressive service, but may be too complex and over-featured for many blogs. There also doesn’t appear to be any support for RSS here.
  • GVisit is like a way pared down Frappr. The interface is very dull, Google Map on grey background, and there’s no mini-map for your front page so you have to just put in a link. There are, however, some desirable features. A list of recent cities visiting, the time of visit shown when flags are clicked on. You can also display the cities of recent visitors on the front page of your site via RSS to HTML. The RSS feed of visitor locations is also subscribable. This service is free, but with a donation of any amount they will track your most recent 100 visitors (up from 20) and remove all advertising from your map (lately there’s been some pretty obnoxious AdSense). I think this service would make sense for people interested in displaying the text of an RSS feed of recent visitors’ locations on the front page of their site, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else.
  • Geo-Loc is a very cool French service. Past visitor locations are in red, visitors currently on the site are in green, and the countries where the current visitors online live are scrolled along the bottom of the map. I think this is rad! You can see the service in action over at the hilarious Barking Moonbat Early Warning System blog, about halfway down the right sidebar. (For those who don’t know, a Barking Moonbat is a raving leftist.) Or you can visit the Geo-Loc home page and view it there with more visitors. I can’t describe the service in depth as i haven’t done French since the 7th grade, and for now it’s beside the point anyway. I’m sad to report that according to the Subscribe page (and Google Translations)

    The significant number of inscriptions requires a maintenance. The inscriptions will be available soon. Thank you for your comprehension.

    That’s a shame, as this looks like a very cool tool for busy sites with global readership! I set up an email alert with Changedetection.com to let me know when the subscription page changes and new accounts are available again. I’d recommend this service to people who can read French, or who have a large number of readers who can. Just kidding, the map itself has only the words “now online” in English and the country names scrolling. Totally usable once you’ve got it installed.

Well, those are my little reviews. I’d love to read thoughts, horror stories, good experiences, interesting applications and alternative services if you’d like to leave a comment.

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Old Media Can Survive in New Media Landscape

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Robin Miller, editor in chief at OSTG.com| Open Source Technology Group, has written a long and interesting article on Slashdot about changes he recommends that newspapers make in order to stop the bleeding of readership losses in the face of the web’s growth in importance. Both the article and the 232 comments at posting time are worth a look, but here’s a summary via some of my favorite parts:

  • Include web-readers in readership numbers and lighten up already about declining print subscribers!
  • Embrace the two-way web by giving reader comments a prominent place and reduced barriers to entry (e.g. multiple logins required before posting).
  • Utilize one of the many established moderation protocols to keep those reader comments as pertinent as possible. The author points out that Slashdot has a battle tested and freely usable, if complex, moderation system available.
  • High-quality events calenders, print-it-yourself coupons and local classified ads are all features that a newspaper’s web site is in the best position to offer of any media.
  • A strong local focus can be a paper’s competitive edge whether in print or online. Few newspapers offer anything uniquely compelling in terms of international news. The internet at large is just too effective in this area.

“Eventually, I expect print newspapers to become “snapshots” of their Web editions taken at 1 a.m. or another arbitrary time, poured into page templates and massaged a little by layout people, then sent to the printing presses, a pattern that has potential for significant production cost reductions if handled adroitly. From that point on, their paper editions will be distributed the same way newspapers are now.

“Senior citizens and others who can’t afford (or don’t want) computers are and will continue to be a viable market. So will commuters who use public transportation. Then there are those — a substantial part of the population — who simply prefer reading words and looking at pictures on paper to seeing them on a screen. They will still want physical newspapers, even if they are not as up-to-date or as complete as what they’d get on the Web.”

These are just a few of my favorite parts of the article itself. As is typical of Slashdot postings, the comments make up another large and valuable part of the info. This is just the kind of discussion that needs to happen. I think that if MSM were to be disappearing (unlikely) we’d really lose out on some things they can do well. But it is very important that old-school organizations make use of the Web 2.0 world to augment what they are already doing. In as much as Web2.0 is about extending participation, honest and open communication and fostering creativity then it’s not just good for business, it’s good for humanity.

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Blogging Software Compared

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The folks over at Sitepoint.com have put together a good comparison of Word Press, Movable Type and TextPattern. These three blogging systems are amongst the most popular and people sometimes ask me, “which one should I use?” Well here’s a good resource to look into.

For more in-depth and technical comparison of a larger number of options, check out Asymptomatic’s Blog Software Breakdown.

If you are interested in corporate blogging or work for a large non-profit, you should look into the MyST-based blog and RSS software of RSS Applied.com. I have been writing on their blog about enterprise blogging and RSS for about a week now and their software seems quite good. The system is designed to maximize your visiblity in search engines, it supports podcasts and other enclosures well, it incorporates RSS beautifully and it supports blogging both publicly and behind a firewall. It’s pretty impressive and comes with a training session.

I hope those are useful pointers for people trying to decide what blog software is best for them.

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Video Sharing with YouTube

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Searching for a video upload tool for a client, I’ve come back to the service I initially thought would be best YouTube.com. There are many options available, but I needed something that would support my Mac, would allow the kind of reposting you’ll see below and had decent server speed. YouTube does not appear to allow subscription to a particular tag’s RSS feed, a major loss. Update: I am wrong about this. The company wrote me back and explained that such feeds could be subscribed to like this: http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/food.rss Fantastic!

It also seems to lack a community of serious users make meaningful use of the medium (web video) but they are far from unique in that. Below are two of my favorite examples of YouTube in use.

To read more about YouTube and some other leading tools for online video sharing, check out Tech Crunch’s comparative reviews: “Comparing the Flickrs of Video”

Hint: You may want to press pause after pressing play, to give the whole video a chance to download. Sometimes my computer has a hard time keeping up, but sometimes it doesn’t.

Chalk La Strada
Uploaded by user Rich Sheikh

MIT Media Lab I/O Brush
Uploaded by several users

Incredible demonstration of a new technology.

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Newsgator has great customer service!

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Once again the folks at Newsgator have come through with prompt, thorough and helpful customer service. Does your web based RSS reader do that? I know that I have more readers via Bloglines than with any other feed reader, so I’d love to hear if anyone has had experiences with their support.

If you have never looked inside a Newsgator account and would like to, I’ve set up a demo account at Newsgator.com username: marshalldemo password:welcome

Much thanks to Jonathon McDougall this time, and Ronnie last time, for their very helpful assistance.

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