Do you follow a website too closely enough that you want to be alerted when new posts come up or something changes? For people who monitor a lot of hosts with website activity, a tool for doing this is a necessity.
Some website owners may also want a way to see what’s being posted on their own site by visitors or contributors.
ChangeDetection.com offers a free service where you can submit a URL that you want to be monitored. Just go to their website, signup for free, then begin submitting URLs. It has a simple interface for entering URLs and monitoring changes:
You may want to get alerted only when a sizable change has occurred (i.e. you will not be alerted about a date change or something minor) or only if text has been added or removed.
This can be useful, for example, when you are monitoring a page that lists things (blogs,classified ads, etc) and you don’t want to be notified when something in that page disappears.
You may set the alert to send once per day, week or month. After you clicked the Create button, the alert will be activated and the service will start listening for changes.
The ability to see the previous version from the current is also very informative with the new text changes highlighted in yellow and the old removed texts lined-out. It’s a great tool to see the slight enhancements website make to the copy over time:
There are other services offered by the site, like comparing two URLs for differences – think of it as diff for HTML content. Another feature allows you to add a change detection panel to your own website so you can have your visitors be notified of changes.
Webmasters and casual users will benefit from this site’s free service. If you own a site that doesn’t have RSS or any other way to notify your visitors of changes, change detection.com is a good option.
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