Simon Willison’s Weblog

Blog update alerts

4th July 2002

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.