Have you ever wanted to monitor a web page or URL and then automatically get notified when the page is updated? Probably you are using some software that you cannot live without and it has a terrible bug. You’ve reported the bug to the author of the software but is only promised to be fixed within 1-2 months time. Manually checking the website or changelog page daily is just a waste of time. Or perhaps you would like to get notified when a raffle is running on our website so you won’t miss out any chances in winning a free license. Website-Watcher, in my humble opinion is one of the most powerful if not the most powerful webpage monitoring software but it is a shareware and requires to run on a computer with an internet connection. If you don’t want to install a software just to monitor one or a few web pages for changes, you can give ChangeDetection a try.
ChangeDetection is a page change monitoring and notification services offered for free to internet users worldwide since 1999. All you need to do is specify the website page that you want to monitor and your email address for them to send the notification when ChangeDetection detected changes on the monitored website page.
Only text from the monitored webpage will be detected as changes. However text that are pulled from an external text file or through javascript will not be counted as changes to the page being monitored. HTML tags, images and flash content are also ignored. One of the biggest problem when monitoring a webpage is when current date is being automatically embedded to the page which will trigger a false change detection. Fortunately you can enable the “sizable change” option when adding/editing the webpage for monitoring so that you will only be notified when there are more than just single words or numbers changing. It is also possible to set ChangeDetection to only notify you when text are added or removed.
You are able to easily identify the changes on the monitored page because ChangeDetection strikes out the text that are removed while highlight the text that are added. The summary of the monitored page also shows the amount of new words, deleted words and the percentage changes. Here is one example of a monitored page of LastPass Release History page by ChangeDetection.
It seems that there isn’t a limit to the amount of webpages you can add to ChangeDetection for monitoring. The only con about ChangeDetection that I can think of is it checks the monitored URL once a day which means it is not suitable for use if you require an instant notification when the page is updated.