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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Blog update alerts

I need a good, reliable way of automatically checking when various weblogs have been updated. I’ve tried aggregators (both Radio Userland and Amphetadesk) and they don’t do it for me—I don’t want to read everyone’s blog entries on one page, I just want to know when I should visit their site for updates. Weblogs.com appears to act as a centralised resource for recording updates, but requires blogs to “ping” it when they are altered—but what if the blog I am interested in doesn’t do this? Mine doesn’t (for the moment at least).

The one constant feature of blogs I visit is an RSS feed, so it looks like I need a tool which can monitor a set of RSS feeds (daily, hourly or whatever) and watch for updates. Does such a thing exist? I would prefer a tool that runs locally to an external service, in fact I’m very tempted to write one myself.

Posted 4th July 2002 at 7:57 pm

This is Blog update alerts by Simon Willison, posted on 4th July 2002.

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4 comments

  1. I'm using IE, and it has a feature where you can "subscribe" to a site which is listed in your bookmarks/favourites. I now have my bookmarks window open showing all my daily reading, and I can see which ones have been updated since last time. It's not perfect. Many blogs have code which changes more often (eg. rotating images, or comments) but is otherwise good. I would like the ability set up a subscription where one URL is checked (eg. RSS) but another URL is displayed ... this would work with framesets then too.

    Eric Scheid - 5th July 2002 01:08 - #

  2. Good opportunity to use python and pythoncard to build yourself an app to fetch their RSS feeds and display any newer than the last time you ran the program ;-)

    Peter - 5th July 2002 08:00 - #

  3. Peter that's exactly what I was thinking :) The IE feature soudns interesting (I've never used it) but I tend to do all of my browsing in Mozilla these days so it doesn't really work for me. As it is I've just discovered blo.gs which does a great job of tracking only blogs you have subscribed to.

    Simon Willison - 5th July 2002 09:57 - #

  4. If you only want to know when a channel has updated (or rather, updated their RSS feed), then you can do this with AmphetaDesk. What AmphetaDesk displays is really up to you - it'd be simple as pie to say "hey, show me a list of sites and when they updated, but don't show me the last three items of that site until I click a link". Let me know if you're interested, and I'll show you how to do it (email is best).

    Morbus Iff - 7th July 2002 02:05 - #

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