Page Monitors - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 55

Figure 3.9
trackle's simple
interface lets you
specify page urls to
monitor and when you
want to monitor them.
While Trackle has a handy place on its Web site that shows you the results
of your last set of updates, it's mostly a mail delivery service. It delivers the
updates of speciied URLs as plain text, but keeps the URLs of an update
clickable. his works well if you're trying to monitor something that will
provide coherent updates—say, a blog that doesn't have an RSS feed (there
are still plenty of these around!) or a page of press release notes. On the
other hand, if you're trying to monitor something that doesn't have coher-
ent updates, such as a list of numbers or book names or something that
won't make much sense without the context of the rest of the page around
it, Trackle isn't a good solution.
Trackle costs $1.95 a month or $19.95 a year to monitor up to 25 pages. It's a
lot cheaper than the other services I've mentioned so far in this chapter, but
on the other hand, it doesn't ofer some of the advanced features of the other
services, including the ability to look for speciic keywords, ignore changes
below a certain page size, and so on.
Even though Trackle is the cheapest of the services I've covered here, for
the number of pages it covers, it's still expensive. If you get to the point
that you want to cover more than 100 pages or so, you're into “$75 or
more” territory. At that point, it's best to use a client-side monitor to keep
track of page changes.