Monitor website updates.

[prose]

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]

Doesn't Google offer such a service?

 

[Bender]

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]

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

 

[prose]

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]

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]

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