László Kozma

site monitor [more ideas]

Often I post a comment on a forum and want to see the responses people send. Sometimes I ask for some technical help or advice on another forum and then I have to keep going back to that page to read all the replies. After a while it becomes a burden to remember all these pages, and go back to them so many times.

I'm thinking of a tool, where I add a webpage url to my list, and it notifies me if something new appears on the site. It could send me the new material in mail, or in an rss feed. This could be used also if I'm expecting some news to appear on a site, and want to monitor it. Or to track changes on some pages, for example the top page for a google search on some term.
This could be a website similar to google alerts, or a desktop app. In case of a desktop app the user could even configure it to bypass authentications with passwords where needed, and monitor those pages too. A website has other advantages (access from everywhere). To make it smarter, one could add filters, and only those updates would be noticed that match some filtering criteria.

EDIT [26/04/2008]
Many similar tools have been found since I have posted this idea. Those are listed in the comments. Recently I've been thinking that it would be more useful to have this service as a Firefox extension. Luckily I searched for existing extensions before jumping at trying to implement my own. Here is a list of extensions that I found (I'm in the progress of checking them one-by-one, but don't hold your breath for any reviews to be posted here):

Page Update Checker (PUC)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/920

Update Scanner
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3362

Notify
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3149

Follow That Page
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3491

Check4Change
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3028