Creeva’s World 2.0

Pic­ture from here

A cou­ple weeks ago I was talk­ing with a friend about an idea for a new web ser­vice.   The web ser­vice would have you enter in all the ser­vices and sites you use and have an account with online, and then send you a twit­ter alert when the pol­icy changed and it would show you which text changed.  My prob­lem is while I could come up with the design, func­tion, and archi­tec­ture I couldn’t fig­ure out any way to mon­e­tize such a ser­vice.  I let it lan­guish and said I would even­tu­ally write a blog arti­cle on how to roll you own.   This is that article.

The key fea­ture to mak­ing this work (obvi­ously) is a ser­vice that can mon­i­tor web­site for changes and give you some sort of data trig­ger out­bound that is usable for repur­pos­ing.  I know I could use ser­vices that would do an RSS feed, but I wanted some­thing more imme­di­ate and trust­wor­thy then RSS for this sce­nario.  I hunted around and I found the ser­vice Change Detec­tion that will send send you an email when a web page has changed.

E-Mail Alerts

With e-mail you have a bit more con­trol.   It’s all easy.  If all you want is an e-mail alert put in the pol­icy page into the page address field.   Then place your e-mail address in the “send alert to:” field.   Easy as cake and your done.

Twit­ter Alerts

What about get­ting twit­ter alerts?  The first thing I’ll point out, I’m not a pro­gram­mer.  I’m sure there are much bet­ter ways to do this in much sim­pler meth­ods.  I have two require­ments for myself.   Keep it free, and it keep it in the cloud.   Make the inter­net do the work for you, it’s always on and online — your com­puter doesn’t have to be.  So instead of using an Uber-Twitterbot I’m going to uti­lize a few free service:

1. Change Detec­tion –Con­fig­ure the pri­vacy page you want to mon­i­tor the same way in sec­tion for get­ting email alerts.  Instead of rely­ing on the emails for noti­fi­ca­tion, change detec­tion allows you to cre­ate an RSS feed for each page you are monitoring.

3. Twit­ter — Setup a new twit­ter account that you can friend.  If you wor­ried about pri­vacy (peo­ple know­ing which sites you are watch­ing), set the updates to be pro­tected so only “friends” can see them.   Have the alert twit­ter account friend you, log out and friend the account back with your main twit­ter account.

4. Twit­ter­feed –Take the feed from change detec­tion, pipe it through twit­ter­feed so it will put update noti­fi­ca­tions to your “alert account”.   Now when­ever any­thing has changed you can watch updates from that account and you’ll have almost real time mon­i­tor­ing of any web page.