Helping business owners maintain their information on the Site

[George Jenkins]

Vivienne:

Perhaps this will help.  You might be able to modify URL-Minder to your
needs.  I use it to inform me of changes at selected sites I wish to
monitor.  URL-Minder is a free service that alerts you when a web site
changes content.  As a subscriber to URL-Minder, you specify what home
pages you want monitored.

URL-Minder is at:	http://www.netmind.com/URL-minder/

URL-Minder presents a message, such as: "You are receiving this message
because you signed up to be regularly notified when this Web page changes.
URL-minder is a free service that you can use to monitor any public Web
pages on the Internet.  You can register as many pages as you would like!
Just go to http://www.netmind.com/URL-minder/"

As I think of it, the LACK of a message can perhaps provide you with the
answer you seek.  That is, the lack of an updated message from URL-Minder
in 30 days (about the sites or clients you wish to track) will tell you
that the site did not update as promised.  You might ask them how to store
URL-Minder messages in a database locally.  For large web sites, you may
decide to track several pages within the site.

The URL-Minder messages goes on to specify how the user can add other web
pages to this notification, change/modify/cancel the URL-Minder
subscription, which is free, and related instructions:

"You can cancel any of your registrations at any time.
You can also get a list that summarizes your registrations."

"There are currently 2834 users registered for this page.
You have 21 URLs registered with the URL-minder."

"The URL-minder is a free, automatic Web-surfing robot that keeps track 
of changes to Web pages that are important to you.  When the URL-minder 
detects changes in any of the Web pages you have registered, it sends 
you e-mail."

URL-Minder is limited.  It doesn't indicate in the message the content of
the web site change.  You are alerted to a change, and then have to visit
the site to understand the content change.

If you get other responses to your question, please forward to me what you
learn.  I am interested, too.  I hope that this helps for you.

George
---------
At 03:44 PM 2/17/97 -0800, you wrote:
>Has any one found an automated way to alert business owners 
>that the information on the Web Site needs updating?
>
>I would like to be able specify a date when the owner of the document 
>should update their information on the Site. For example, X 
>puts up a document and agrees that they will revise it 30 
>days time, so that when the 30 days have gone by X gets an 
>email message to say this page 
>(http://www.blah.blah/blah.htm) needs to be updated or 
>removed?
>
>Has anyone developed any solutions to this or are their Web 
>Servers which will do this automatically?
>
>Thanks in advance
>
>Vivienne 
> 
>Vivienne Cuff
>World Wide Web
>National Library of New Zealand
>Molesworth Street (or PO Box 1467)
>Wellington
>Phone: 4743086 Int'l prefix: 644
>EMAIL: Vivienne.Cuff at natlib.govt.nz
>WWW: http://www.natlib.govt.nz/
>--------------------------------------
>These are my views, and they do not 
>necessarily reflect National Library
>of New Zealand policy.
>
>


-----
Photocopy requests via the Web
http://library.hbs.edu/photocopy.htm
-----
George Jenkins                617.495.6837 (voice)
Business Information Analyst  617.496.3725 (fax)
Research Services             GJenkins at hbs.edu
Baker Library # 215           http://library.hbs.edu/
Harvard Business School       http://www.hbs.edu