Topic: web tool to monitor/check updated URLs?

[sunjan]

Hi all,

I've been looking for an application that will monitor an URL for me, and check for updates.
My idea was to point it to the tour section of my favorite band sites. Whenever the band adds a tour date, I'd get some kind of notification.

I found this, but haven't tried it yet:
http://www.watchthatpage.com/

Are there better apps out there? Maybe some Firefox plugin that works just as well?

TIA!

[rsimms3]

Google Alerts/News if the band is big enough to get coverage.  It scours the net and sends you an email based on the keywords you program it for.  Do they have an RSS feed?  That would be another option.  Then there is Twitter.... 

[sunjan]

Google Alerts/News if the band is big enough to get coverage.  It scours the net and sends you an email based on the keywords you program it for.  Do they have an RSS feed?  That would be another option.  Then there is Twitter.... 

Neat! I never really understood what Google Alert was good for.

However, there are some bands which would probably fly under the radar, since they'r either obscure/Swedish, or have a very generic band name (like "Sophia").

I found a bunch of other apps. They either work as online services (web UI), or as a downloaded Windows utility that runs in the background. Here's an overview:
http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/monitor.htm

It seems that there are some Firefox add-ons, but I haven't had time to check them out yet:
https://addons.mozilla.org/sv-SE/firefox/search?q=monitor+change&cat=all

The tools I've looked at so far all require that I submit the entire path for each sub-page that I want to monitor.
What I'm looking for is an app where I can submit a domain (say www.kraftwerk.com), and it will return updated to all pages that get updated under that top page.

If anyone else knows what I'm talking about, chime in :-)

[sentat]

I haven' actually played around with it yet, but I'm guessing you could make something like this with yahoo pipes: http://pipes.yahoo.com/
Their 'browse' page has an option for creating an RSS feed for a page that doesn't already have one, so even if you had to add multiple pages to that, and then filter the result looking for 'tour' / 'dates' / 'gig' etc would probably work. Worth a look if you have the time and inclination.

[sunjan]

I haven' actually played around with it yet, but I'm guessing you could make something like this with yahoo pipes: http://pipes.yahoo.com/

Wow, that looks really powerful! I can't believe Pipes has been around for 2 years and not gotten more coverage.
I can even push the feed to my mobile phone thru Yahoo alerts, using my network provider's mail-to-sms gateway:
http://alerts.yahoo.com/myalerts.php

It looks like the perfect mashup tool. Thanks!