Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Yahoo Pipes
Yahoo Pipes
is a free service that lets you fetch information from RSS feeds and other
sources, filter it, sort it, and manipulate it in a variety of other ways, with a new RSS
feed as the output.
You create pipes by dragging modules from a list onto a canvas, filling in some
blanks, and drawing lines to connect the doohickeys together. In that way, it's much
like Automator, except that all this happens in a Web browser, and it's strictly for
processing Web/RSS content.
Pipes won't replace a service like IFTTT or Google Alerts, but it may be a good
option for passively monitoring topics of interest—or creating your own customized,
composite RSS feeds.
Use a Cloud Service to Monitor a Web Site for Changes
In the
online appendixes
to my topic about backing up your Mac, I have tables listing the
features of many backup apps and cloud services. This information changes all the time,
though.OneofthewaysIkeepthatinformation(moreorless)uptodateisbymonitoringthe
pages that list release notes or other version information for each of dozens of apps. When
one of the pages changes, I check to see if the change is relevant to my table, and if so, I
update the table accordingly.
Needless to say, I don't manually check dozens of Web pages for changes every day! Instead,
I use a free service that checks for me and sends me an email if any of my monitored pages
has changed since the last time it checked.
I've used two such services—
WatchThatPage
,
which is has a kind of awkward and
old-fashioned interface, but gets the job done; and
ChangeDetection.com
, which is more
modern and customizable. (For example, it can send change notices via a custom RSS feed,
much like Google Alerts, and it can look for specific text that is added or removed.) Either
way, the process is dead simple: sign up for a free account, enter a URL, and click a button to
start monitoring it.
Tip:
If you do use a service like this, do yourself a favor and set up a rule in your
favorite email client (see
Automate Email
)
to file all those change reports into a special
mailbox. They tend to accumulate over time!
Other reasons to monitor Web sites for changes:
