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

I happen to visit a lot of sites everyday (my main sources, apart from blogs are Thumblicious and Digg) and when I find something interesting I don’t have time to read it immediately but just want to save it for later.

The solution comes with toread: if you logon to www.toread.cc you can bookmark your “toread” web pages by just clicking the bookmarklet on your browser. A screenshot of the web page will be sent to you via email.

toread
http://www.toread.cc

Technorati Tags: toread, bookmark