‘How can I be automatically notified when when there are updates or changes to website a that doesn’t have a RSS or Atom feed?’ I asked that question when I got sick of forgetting to go and check websites in order to see if anything had changed. After a bit of hunting I found Update Scanner, which is a plugin for Firefox, a web browser that I highly recommend. Update Scanner also works with Portable Firefox. Update Scanner can be used as an alternative to a feed reader, but I think that if a RSS feed is available then a feed reader is a better option in most cases.
Update Scanner is simple to use and does what it claims to do. Basically it’s set-and-forget: you tell it what web pages to monitor and it will let you know when they’re updated.
With Update Scanner you can:
- control how often each web page is automatically scanned for updates, or turn off automatic scanning and do manual scans
- set a notification threshold for each web page, e.g. ‘Only notify me if there is a change of more than 100 characters’
- have the changes highlighted in a colour of your choice, or turn off highlighting: there are individual controls for each web page. Update Scanner highlights changes in yellow by default: I leave it at that, and often turn off the highlighting when actually viewing a changed page. The screen shot below shows you how to do that.
- control the behaviour of the alerts, which are visible and/or audible
- mark all changed pages as read/visited without actually visiting them
Installing and using Update Scanner
This isn’t a complete treatment: for more information see the screen shot below and the help pages.
If you’ve got Firefox installed go to the Update Scanner installation page and click the big green button to add it to Firefox.
When it comes to opening Update Scanner you have three options:
- Alt+U
- Click Tools>Update Scanner
- Click the icon in the status bar at bottom of your Firefox window – see screen shot below
To add a web page to Update Scanner go to that web page and then open Update Scanner using one of the methods shown above. Next click the button that I’ve marked as ‘Add a web page’ in the screen shot below and an options box will pop up. Set the options for that page and you’re done.
Remember that update scanner looks at web pages, not web sites. So, if you’ve set Update Scanner to monitor a site’s home page it won’t tell you if one of the other pages on that site have been changed. E.g.:
- you set Update Scanner to monitor my home page at http://practicalcomputing.wordpress.com/
- Update Scanner won’t tell you if there are changes to my About page at http://practicalcomputing.wordpress.com/8/about/. If you want to monitor that page as well you need to add it Update Scanner.
Click on the screen shot to enlarge it
That pretty much covers all the basics, so go for it.
