Page Monitors - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 56

Client-Side Page Monitors
here are a few major disadvantages to using client-side monitors for the Web
pages you want to track. he irst is that a client-side monitor is only available
from your computer, not from all over the Internet. he second disadvan-
tage is that unless you leave your computer on all the time, you won't be able
to automate how oten your bookmarks are checked. And if your computer
crashes or has a problem, you'll need to make sure you have backups.
But there are advantages too! Because you're using sotware on your computer,
you can have more detailed control over the kinds of monitoring you do. You
can monitor pages as oten as you like, even every 5 minutes if you want to.
And you can monitor huge numbers of pages—200, 500, even over 1,000. You
can do that with online services, of course, but at a terriic expense.
Can't possibly imagine wanting to monitor that many pages ? Believe me,
once you've been doing information trapping for a while, you'll see how
much time it can save you, compared to hunting down information manu-
ally all the time. And then you'll begin to discover how many of your every-
day searching chores can be turned into traps, and gradually you'll ind
yourself wanting to monitor more and more pages!
page monitors for Windows
For Windows page monitoring, there's one program I adore and can't recom-
mend enough. I've been using it for years and it's amazing: WebSite-Watcher.
By all rights, WebSite-Watcher (aignes.com) should have its own book. It's
powerful, inexpensive, amazingly feature-rich, and an indispensable tool
for Windows-based information trappers. here's no way I can do justice
to all its features in part of a chapter. So I'm going to hit the highlights and
encourage you to download it (a free trial is available), play with it, and if
you like it, add it to your toolbox!
When you irst launch WebSite-Watcher, a screen displays that looks like
Figure 3.10 .
here are two ways you can organize your pages to be monitored. You can
monitor everything in one big ile, or you can set up diferent iles to moni-
tor diferent topics in which you're interested. For example, I have a ile for