Page Monitors - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 46

Figure 3.1
trackle, a Web-based
monitoring service,
sends out plain-text
update notices of the
pages it monitors.
. Client-side. Client-side page monitoring sotware is installed on your
computer and keeps copies of the pages it grabs on your computer for
comparison purposes. he downside with this type of page monitor
is that if you're not at your computer or have alternative access to
it, you're not going to be able to access your page changes. Another
downside is that unless you're connected to the Internet 24/7 with
broadband (and you really need a broadband connection if you're
going to monitor any number of pages), you might not get around
to doing regular scanning. On the upside, client-side sotware lets
you easily manage large numbers of monitored pages (several thou-
sand in my case), whereas it can be cost-prohibitive to do that with
an online service. Finally, client-side page monitors are usually much
more conigurable than Web-based ones, and can oten avoid false-
positive page change alerts.
Within these two categories, there are dozens of page monitors available,
with varying functionality. he rest of this chapter provides an overview of
some monitors I like and recommend.