RSS is a great technology for monitoring news on websites but it’s kind of limited to blogs. What can you do if you want to monitor a website which doesn’t offer an RSS feed? For example, monitor your competitors websites for changes?

A good solution comes from a new product: UpdatePatrol from Bitberry Software.
UpdatePatrol monitors a number of websites of your choices and notifies you of changes.

I installed UpdatePatrol on my system and loaded a bunch of my competitors websites. You can insert your websites manually or with a simple drag and drop. Once set, UpdatePatrol monitors your websites (at the schedule you set) and notifies of any update, highlighting the changes. It uses a smart algorithm to ignore dynamic data in page comparisons, e.g. number of visitors, dates, timestamps etc. This is configurable using regular expressions (a pattern matching syntax) for maximum flexibility.

UpdatePatrol lets you monitor RSS feeds too. Although its a nice built-in feature, if you are used to a feed reader, you’ll probably stick to your old habits: I personally prefer to monitor my feeds using Google Reader, as I detailed in this post.

If you find yourself looking at a number of sites, just to check for changes UpdatePatrol can save you a ton of time. The only thing that I miss is a more tight integration with the browser to add sites more easily. Definitely, I warmly suggest that you give it a try.

UpdatePatrol costs 49.95$ and comes with a 30-day money back guarantee. You can download a fully functional 30-day trial at http://www.updatepatrol.com/download.html

Bitberry Software Update Patrol
http://www.updatepatrol.com

A new version (1.2) of Direct Access has been released today. It’s mainly a maintenance release. Here are the main changes:

• the command detection has been improved reducing its impact on the system (some user, with v.1.1 reported issues typing certain key combinations on some programs)
• Multi monitor support
• Reduced delay when sending text (autotext) to other applications (can now be reduced to 20ms)
• Autotext can be now used in the command prompt window (cmd)
• The Hub does no longer appear in the window list (when ALT tabbing)

Download it from Nagarsoft

150+ clean and clear icons to use in your nifty web application, licensed as creative commons so commercial use is fine. Include photoshop source so you are free to edit them.

Sweetie
http://sweetie.sublink.ca (via Larkware)

If  you have an e-commerce site, it’s paramount to know if it goes down to take the proper countermeasures. Having an application running on your machine that pings the website is impractical and doesn’t work if you pc is turned off.

Much more reliable is a web monitoring service like Montastic, that pings your sites every ten minutes from two different locations and notifies you if something is wrong.

Montastic allows you to monitor up to 100 websites for free. If your server goes down it’ll send you an email. Another email is sent when the site is back up.

You can also see your sites status via RSS or using a Yahoo Widget (you can download the Yahoo Widget Engine here for free) so that you can always keep an eye on your sites.

I added three sites: my main website, my blog (which is hosted by another ISP) and my Plimus order page. I can sleep better now.

Montastic
http://www.montastic.com

Technorati Tags: montastic, website monitoring

They have many names. The dictionary calls them boilerplate text, but you’ll also find them as stationery, AutoText, templates, canned text or text macros. The idea is always the same: type a text once – use it many times.

How many times are you typing the same answers again and again to customers that are asking always the same questions (probably ignoring any FAQ)? Test it! For the next twenty answered mails, pause for a second and think if you didn’t write that answer (complete or in parts) before. You’ll see that it happens more often than you thought.

Having canned text or text macros handy can be a great time saver and taking a little effort organizing the text can quickly pay off. You just have to start it and the more boilerplate replies you have ready, the more time you can save.

Read the in deep discussion of the uses of boiler plate text is in the article Thomas Holtz (reproduced here with permission of the author) published in the September issues of the ASPects, the monthly magazine of the ASP.

Read the full article: boilerplatetext.pdf (40KB)

Technorati Tags: Boilerplate text, text substitution, technical support

Bartelme design is offering on its blog a shopping cart icon that you can freely use on your website. It also offers a collection of other nice icons.

Bartelme Design
http://www.bartelme.at/journal/archive/shopping_cart_icon

Technorati Tags: icons, shopping cart

I started my reading blogs using an aggregator about eight months ago and my choice was bloglines. The most important thing was the ability to have everything online, so that I could read the feeds at work and at home with no need to synchronize them.

After reading a rave review of the updated Google Reader on Lifehacker, I decided it was time to give it a another try. I must say I’m really thrilled with this web app.

Here’s what I really love about it:

• Clear and easy to use interface
• Items are marked as read as you scroll: this is a big improvement over bloglines that automatically marked all items as read when displayed on the right panel. This can be useful when I have a long list and no time to read it all in one session
• Ability to see the posts in list and detail view and mark them as special
• Shortcuts harmonized with GMail to navigate between posts

On top of that, there are some greasemonkey scripts for Firefox that make using it even easier:

• Jasper’s google reader subscribe shows a small feed icon on the top of any site that supports feeds. Clicking on that, you can add the site to your subscription list. If you are already subscribed to the feed, it shows a check mark.
• Feed integration for Gmail that lets you easily integrate Google Reader feeds into Gmail

The only thing I miss is the ability to specify the tag of a new feed when I add one.

Technorati Tags: aggregators, Google Reader, rss

I received a message from a customer telling me Direct Access was identified as a key-logger by Spy Sweeper.

Installing the trial version confirmed that as the following screen appeared. Apparently, even with Spy Sweeper active, Direct Access continues to work properly: sometimes a window appears telling me about the “threat”. That’s not the best welcome mat for a prospect who’s just installed the new software!

I cannot blame Spy Sweeper for that: Direct Access works like a key logger since it needs to detect which keys are pressed to recognize the user commands. I tried to contact Webroot about the problem but the case has to be opened by a customer and, unfortunately, it looks like mine is not willing to go through their loops to solve this issue.

If you happen to be a Spy Sweeper customer, please write them about Direct Access so that they can update their definitions.

Direct Access was featured on Bits du Jour on the 10th October and a 50% discount, on sale at 19.97$ instead of 39.95$.

The promotion ended with 17 copies sold at discounted price, plus 2 regular copies. It was great day

I would like to thank Ellen of Bits du Jour for the superb work done on the copy. She wrote it from scratch and patiently mended it according to my suggestions. She also gave me the right to republish it on my website. I believe she’s really good at presenting things from the customer perspective, something that’s really difficult for business owners who “created” their product.

I believe that important roles where played by:

• publishing a note in her blog and newsletter about the upcoming sale. From that day I could see traffic of people from bitsdujour downloading my software so that they are “ready” for the sale.
• the day before the promotion, a link in the main Bitsdujour page pointed to my website (I got roughly the same traffic on the 9th and 10th of October, about 80 visitors from Bits du jour - that’s what Google Analytics said)
• a post from the Direct Access lover Patrick McKenzie on his blog telling about the promotion

A lot of people sent comments and suggestion. It was a really interesting experience and if you sell software you should try it, just to see you products through Ellen eyes who is a great copywriter.

Here’s the original text, as appeared on Bits du Jour:

Launch Fast: Direct Access
We feel like we spend half our lives navigating between applications. We set up our PCs for efficient navigation a long time ago, but we run so many programs at once, and have so many web pages open, and have files in so many folders - we just figured that it was impossible to be as fast as we used to be.

But then we found Direct Access. Direct Access lets us get to anything - a specific web page, a folder, a document or a program - using just a few keys. We make the shortcuts, so they’re words that make sense to us and that we can easily remember. And we can use them from any program - we don’t need to leave the current program or document first.

Plus, Direct Access’s autotext feature lets us substitute any short key combination we’ve set up for any long phrase we frequently need. And because they work inside any program, we only have to remember one set.

Use Direct Access to:

• Start your email program with just “eml“
• Check your eBay auction without leaving the email you’re writing
• Edit your timesheet file by typing just “tims“
• Open your My Documents folder just by typing “mydox“
• Mute your speakers without leaving your current document
• Run your backup job by typing just “bak”

Direct Access lets you choose your own command words so you can pick something easy for you to enter and remember. Commands are executed as soon as entered or upon pressing a confirmation key (like F1) so they won’t get in the way of your other work.

And then use Autotext to really speed up your work. For example:

• Type “plmkq” and have it turn into “Please let me know if I can answer any other questions.”
• Have several different email signatures, and enter any of them with just the abbreviation you’ve chosen.
• Abbreviate your URL, cell phone number, street address, difficult html string, or any text that you find yourself typing over and over

News for deal seekers: Direct Access is on sale - only today -, 10th October, on bitsdujour at 50% off.

Bits du jour offers a new software at huge discount everyday. So, if you are looking for a deal, don’t miss it.

Bitsdujour
http://www.bitsdujour.com