Keep track of changes on your favourite web pages

You want to be informed about changes in what your favourite web pages show? After all, you don't want to miss anything but you don't want to keep clicking on pages that haven't changed since your last visit. Here you find some basics of how you can proceed.

Here is what works in any case:

be notified automatically about updates on any web page of your choosing - a program on your workstation does the tracking

For this you need to install a small program on your PC, which knows about your favourite web pages, scans those pages for you at predefined time intervals and tells you once it sees changes.

If you are like most of the visitors of our library web pages in that you use the web browsers firefox, update Scan is the right tool for you. Update scan is a free enhancement of firefox version 2.0 (as of this time, 1 June 2007). After installing it you will find a new menu item, on right click on any web page, that starts the scan of that specific page. Why not try this on our library entrance page?

If however you are hooked to the internet explorer you are on your own here. There are shareware solutions which might or might not work for you.

Here is what sometimes works

Be notified about changed content by the owner of specially prepared web pages - the owner of the pages does the informing

Many journals (and also other news agents) offer information about their content - or else alterations of content - in a short format called RSS feed. These news can be read with an "RSS reader" which can be part of the brower - and in fact newer versions of browsers like firefox do have this feature implemented. If you want to play with designated RSS readers you may want to have a look at the suggestions on the pages of the APS, or else you may decide to stay with what your browser has built in. On the pages of the journal - in case it offers RSS feeds - you then have to activate (subscribe to) the feed by typically just one click. In fact this works most conveniently for notifications about new publications or citations by the data base Web of Science!

Many journals offer also to inform you about new issues by the conventional means of email