How can I track web sites with important information?

Increasingly some of the most useful sources of information to you are likely to be contained in web sites. It is possible to keep track of the location of your favourite and most visited sites using your internet browser 'favourites' or 'bookmarks' facility. However, this cannot alert you to the most recent changes to any specific site.

Fortunately there are several other methods by which you can 'monitor' a web site for new content.

  1. Check to see if you can register as a user of the site and receive emails directly about recent up-dates and new information being posted.
  2. Use the news or 'RSS' feeds that are published by some web sites. The following BBC's Feed Factory provides a simple introductory guide. These feeds can be added to your browser or email client. The simplest way of getting instructions for this is to search for RSS feeds and your preferred browser or email client.
  3. It is possible to register to use a web monitoring service or purchase software that will look at pages of selected web sites and check for changes in content. If you search for "monitoring changes to web pages" in your search engine, you will find some of the more popular ones. Some of the web monitoring service providers offers some level of free service. Examples include: