First, a caveat: WatchThatPage.com is not meant to be an uptime monitoring system in the same sense as a RedAlert or a Dotcom Monitor. Here is the description from their front page:
WatchThatPage is a service that enables you to automatically collect new information from your favorite pages on the Internet. You select which pages to monitor, and WatchThatPage will find which pages have changed, and collect all the new content for you. The new information is presented to you in an email and/or a personal web page. You can specify when the changes will be collected, so they are fresh when you want to read them. The service is free!
However, since I have a bit of a one-track mind, I thought I would try to use it as an uptime monitor, to see what happened.
The service, as mentioned, is free. Signup is minimal, requiring just an email address, your name and a country. It also allows you to set your timezone, which is a simple feature, but very welcome. Then I chose some update times. Since I wanted to push the system a little, I used the 'add update time' feature on my profile page to tell it to check 9 times per day, once per hour from 1am to 4pm, at 8am, and once per hour from 10 am to 1pm. I was happy to see a checkoff for 'report broken pages', which is a little more in tune with the services that are actually meant to do uptime monitoring. There was also a pulldown asking whether I wanted the notification email to show me the actual changes, or just to tell me which page had changed. I chose to see the changes.
You then want to pick some pages to watch. I hit the 'Pages' nav button, and chose about 5 pages that I was interested in, including one that changes a lot (practially every time you look at it, in fact).
Now, since I had a page that changes frequently as one of my monitored sites, I got a LOT of email from WatchThatPage, as you can imagine. The email itself contained the text-based and link-based content that is different from the last time each page was changed. If a site has not changed, it is not reported. The system did tell me at least once when a page was not responding, but I probably should have chosen the 'only show me which pages have changed' option, since after receiving 9 emails from them every day, I stopped looking at the content, and just started deleting them.
They also have a keyword matching option, which I did not end up using. Theoretically, I could have looked for error conditions, but since it seems to be a global option rather than configurable for each page, all of the sites would have to report errors in the same way. Of course, I have already mentioned that I am using this system in a way that was not intended, so we can't really fault the authors of WatchThisPage for not supporting my twisted use of their service. :)
Apparently, Thomas Edison once said "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
WatchThatPage seems like it could be a nifty tool for some purposes, but not for ours. Thus, we have found one way that doesn't work.
In spite of everything i prefer Dotcom-monitor
Posted by: Firon Fitz | December 29, 2007 at 06:46 AM