Monitor website updates.

prose · Nov 9, 2005

Anyone know of a free site/program/service that lets you know when a website updates?

The website is currently a blank index page. I want to know when it is developed.

Dan.

OgieOgalthorpe · Nov 9, 2005

Doesn't Google offer such a service?

Bender · Nov 9, 2005

you can create a PHP script that checks the index for changes and make it run every X days via cron...pretty easy, actually;-)

katherine · Nov 10, 2005

There are plenty. As an example:
http://www.changedetection.com/monitor.html

prose · Dec 9, 2005

IT Web Team: can you further explain how easy it would be?

I have quite a few sites I need to monitor in house.

Bender · Dec 9, 2005

prose said:
IT Web Team: can you further explain how easy it would be?
I have quite a few sites I need to monitor in house.

well, can you elaborate a little?
You can create a PHP script that checks a certain page(last modified,page size,etc), and make it run every X days via cron.
http://www.php.net/curl
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.fsockopen.php
might help you.
Daniel

prose · Dec 9, 2005

Thanks, I do know my way around PHP so I should be able to figure it out.

I have a list of about 600 sites I need to monitor for updates. But it might be very difficult to do so since many are forums or parked pages which update small content everyday.

Are you thinking I download the index to a file or database entry then check to see if they are the same with a compare or md5sum? or does curl check the filesize of a page when loading?

-Dan