Thursday, May 08, 2008

Gordon's Tech: Monitoring Dyer with ChangeDetection.com vs. Page2RSS

Gwynne Dyer, an iconoclastic journalist and historian, notifies readers of new articles by updating his web page. He typically adds 4-5 articles every 3-7 weeks; the linked articles are the published as .txt files -- not HTML.

Yes, Firefox will render .txt files.

I've been tracking changes with ChangeDetection.com and receiving feed reader notifications through Bloglines email subscriptions. This has been working well, but now Phil Bradley tells us that Page2RSS will create a custom RSS feed for pages like this.

I'm running a side-by-side comparison, after a month or two I aim to return and update this post with my preference.

Update 5/16/08: Page2RSS is really neat ... so far!

Update 5/18/08: A comment on Gordon's Notes also suggests Feedity. Feedity also supports feed merges, Yahoo Pipes does this and more.

Update 6/3/08: On one page I was monitoring Feedity sent me a high volume of false notifications (false positives). On the same page Page2RSS sent me only one update, and that one was correct. So I'm favoring Page2RSS.

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