Helpful Tip: Monitor Sites for Changes with RSS Feeds

Back in March we introduced you to a service called Feedity which creates a feed for sites without syndication. As I had mentioned at the time, there’s nothing more frustrating than coming across a site that I’d like to keep tabs on that doesn’t have any syndication available. This is why Feedity and other services similar to it like Drapper are so helpful. In the comments of that article, Karveira pointed out a few additional services that they knew of with one of them being Page2RSS.com. Today I thought we’d take a look at this service to see what it offers.

We’ll start with the basics first- what is Page2RSS? It’s simply a service that will help you monitor web sites for changes that do not publish a feed.  It can check any web page for an update, and does this every 2-4 hours. If a change has been made, you’ll get updates in your RSS aggregator. To use the service, you can either enter the URL of the website you’re wanting to monitor on the Page2RSS site and click “to RSS,” or you can install the Page2RSS toolbar which will be helpful if you end up using this service frequently.

One of the downsides is that you can’t specify which part of a site you’d like monitored for changes. On some sites a date is displayed which is automatically updated daily.  If the date was the only thing that changed, you’d still get the update in your RSS feed which would defeat the purpose. Using this service for a site that you want to monitor which isn’t updated often (given that they don’t update the date each day) would prove to be the most useful so that you wouldn’t have to constantly check back. Another way that this would come in handy is if you’re waiting for a new program to come out. Just create a feed for the program’s website, and once it launched, you’d know via RSS.

Overall I’d say for everyday purposes, Page2RSS isn’t recommended. But, if you have a site or two that you’d like to monitor for changes - Page2RSS is just what you’re looking for.

 This is just one of the many helpful tips that we have done. You can find more of them by visiting our Helpful Tips category, or by subscribing to our Helpful Tips feed. We also have a full feed available if you want to receive all of our articles in your reader!

Tags: Helpful Tips, Web Sites, Feed Reader, Feeds, RSS

Related Posts:

• CyberNet’s Year in Review: November-December
• Check For Page Changes In Firefox
• Monitor Website Changes in Firefox
• Helpful Tip: Wikipedia RSS Feeds
• Helpful Tip: How to Move Windows with the Keyboard