Are there web sites that you check regularly...
...to see whether there's anything new? And usually there isn't?
Then you need Subscriber to check them for you.
Say you’re a horse fanatic and you’ve entered the win-a-horse competition whose result is going to be announced “some time this month” on a certain web page. Or say you’d like to be informed whenever CNN has news about horses. Or about a particular horse. Or say there’s a horse blog that is updated at unpredictable intervals, and when it is, you’d like to know about it fast.
What do you do?
Do you check the relevant web site every ten minutes? Boring!
Do you use the ‘Subscribe’ feature built into some browsers? This is unsatisfactory in various ways, of which perhaps the most important is this: web pages often contain features that change all the time – dates, advertisements, and so on. Plus genuine content that you’re not interested in monitoring: if the ‘competitions’ page is not only about horses but also announces results of the dog competition, the cat competition, the lizard competition … what you’d really like to do is check the page regularly for certain types of change only.
Subscriber can do that for you. With Subscriber, you subscribe to a web page (for example by dragging its URL from a browser’s address field); then you choose a criterion for what sort of changes Subscriber should report. That’s it! You never have to worry about checking that web site again. And you can choose from a variety of methods that Subscriber can use to notify you of changes, and many other customisation options.
Subscriber was written by David Deutsch. It is shareware from Charcoal Design and costs $14.99 (plus sales tax where applicable).
