Sunday, April 30, 2006

Using FeedBlitz to monitor any web page

What if the site you care about doesn't have an RSS feed? How can you use FeedBlitz to monitor it? Well, actually, you can, although your options are a little limited because there's less structured information for FeedBlitz to work with.

You set up a subscription in the usual way - from the dashboard or using one of the toolbar add ins - and FeedBlitz will track and email you an update saying "The page at [the page's URL] has changed", prompting you to go visit (by clicking the included link). This works well, except for sites that use a lot of adverts or change frequently. For these it will look as if the page has changed almost every time FeedBlitz checks it, sending you an update. If this happens, see if you can get at the content another way (using RSS ideally), or write to the site to see when they're going to add RSS capabilities.