One problem we’ve discovered since moving beyond static - almost spammy - sites was that updating mass amounts of sites is both boring and time consuming. While we make a list of sites and look to them for news on a semi regular basis, in our niche visitors want news updated as it happens and to date, we’ve been unable to deliver that kind of service.
Well, yesterday I remembered seeing a website awhile back that notified you of updates to your favorite sites. At the time, I thought it was a pretty lame idea, but this line of thinking got me pretty excited and so I started looking for the site I vaguely remembered seeing.
Long story short: though I found a website that checks for updates, it only checked each site once per day, and I was about to give up when I came across a program called Webmon. It’s a free shareware program that you set up to check the sites of your choosing at set intervals, and if it detects any change to the text, it sends you an email.
It took a few minutes for the usefulness of webmon to set in… if I have a mobile device like a blackberry or anything that can accept emails, then I can set the program to visit each site once every few hours and let me know if there is some news I can report on! Or, instead of having to force myself to go through a list of 40 websites looking for news on all our celebrities - and always lagging behind my competition - I can simply read the emails on my computer and update the sites daily, based on whether something has actually happened or not.
I’m sure this idea won’t help everyone, but for those of you out there who run multiple sites, this could really make your work time more efficient. Or, if you have a competition’s site nipping at your heels, you can make sure you’re never too far behind.
April 18th, 2007 at 3:07 am
Does it works like an RSS feed reader?
April 18th, 2007 at 4:05 am
Thats pretty cool. I run similar programs to keep my own sites running.
I was thinking that it might be a problem if the site you are monitoring displays the current date - that way it looks like the site is updated daily even though it isn’t. I am thinking you might be able to run the site through Dapper to make sure you only check the part of the website that has news.
Though the program might have this ability already.
April 18th, 2007 at 7:48 am
Webmon allows you to select which part of the html code or even specific pages so you can get creative but after futher experience I am noticing the time stamps do cause problems when it comes to our fan sites since the news is generally updated on a regular basis and most of our sources do use time stamps so it does cause some problems but its a step in the right direction.
Chee, it works simular to a RSS Feed reader though for my intents I was looking for something which would alert me to specific sites so if I had to update sites for say 40 celebrities that it could scan 2-3 sites per celebrity and let me know when a specific celeb had news.. I probably will have to keep looking for a better program but for most people who don’t need that much functionality a free program like web mon hopefully would suffice.