Is There an App to Track Website Updates?

[600burger]

Anyone know of any app (preferably free, or built into windows) that can track a website and tell me if the information on that page has been updated.

I'm working on tracking a large amount of Legislation bills and need to be updated on when they are being ammending/voted/enacted.

Thanks,
-Andrew

 

[Kirro]

Interesting, not sure how I would go about doing that. How much of the page has to change in order for it to be marked as "new."

 

[chroot]

The HTTP headers returned by the server include a last-modification timestamp. If you know just about any programming language, it should be an easy task to send requests to the server for a bunch of URLs, record the timestamps, and compare them with the last timestamps.

It'd probably be 10-15 lines of Python.

- Warren

 

[Kirro]

I was thinking something around the same lines but I checked the headers of these forum pages and didn't see any timestamp.

 

[chroot]

Well, these forum pages are generated dynamically by PHP, so they don't have modification times.

Normal html files should, however.

I actually just realized an easier way. Send all your requests with an If-Modified-Since: header, and just read the response code.

- Warren

 

[Kirro]

Yep, you are right. I forgot php pages show the modified date as the time you are accessing the page.

hehe

In that case the IF statement would work perfectly.

 

[mcjohn1989]

thanks so much for useful info
website update[/color]