In a continually changing and growing web world, you’re undoubtedly going to encounter web sites with information useful to you, but that are not regularly updated.  In these instances, you don’t want to spend a load of time remembering to check in periodically, or risk missing something great because you forgot to check in.  Even if you do remember to make the site visit, not all web site’s provide handy aggregation the way sites like Facebook or Myspace do for allowing a follower to keep up on what changes are being made to which pages.  Still, there are times when you want to know about a change and being late could cost you a bunch of money.  That’s where ChangeDetection.com comes in.

Not too dissimilar from Google Alerts, ChangeDetection.com (CD) monitors specific web pages (not to be confused with entire web sites), rather than specific terms.  Once a day it makes a visit to each site you provide in a list along with specific change-monitoring criteria, compares the latest view with the previously cached view, and sends you an email if anything new has appeared or disappeared.  A major time saver.  Especially if you have more than two handfuls of pages you’re monitoring.

A couple of potential drawbacks, but by no means deal breakers: 1) CD does not monitor changes to images or flash, only text; and 2) You have to enter each frame of a frameset to be monitored, even if it’s all one page.  So you can see where you might need to do a bit of tweaking to get things working in a way that will prove useful.

I’m typically monitoring government agency sites for updates to program regulations, application announcements, and changes to lists of events.  ChangeDetection is awesome for this type of activity, and has again proved that there are time-saving uses for the Interweb.

Read the CD FAQ for more information.

Monitor Web Text With ChangeDetection.com was first posted to justinll.com on August 6, 2008.