Minding the Web
iMorph's InfoMinder automates website change-tracking
InfoMinder is a service that consolidates newsletters, syndicated newsfeeds, and manual website tracking into a single easy-to-use solution.
The problem: How can I efficiently track changes on websites vital to my professional interest?
A recent article in eWeek1 focused on network security. The article include a helpful sidebar, eWeek Labs Recommends: Key security resources, which listed fourteen URLs and suggested: "Every IT pro should bookmark and visit these sites -- often." Of course they should. Likewise, workers in every area of the information economy should keep a close eye on the websites vital to those areas. The question is: "How?" More specifically:
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How can I find the time to do this monitoring?
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How can I consolidate all this monitoring into a single activity?
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How can I can I focus on all the changes, and only the changes?
The web offers a variety of monitoring solutions, and in a way that's part of the problem. Some sites enable you to register for email alerts, but each signup procedure is different, and dozens of alerts from dozens of sites can swamp your email inbox. Other sites syndicate newsfeeds to aggregators, and when that's true, you can save a lot of time and consolidate your monitoring activities. But news syndication, though practiced by some sites (notably, technology sites), is not yet a reliable standard. So if you want to stay current in an area, and really cover the area exhaustively, you're stuck with a cumbersome mix of strategies. You sign up for email alerts when available, you track newsfeeds when available, and the rest of the time you visit sites one at a time. Then, it's up to you to synthesize all these information flows in order to build up a complete picture.
The solution: iMorph's InfoMinder
InfoMinder is a service that tracks changes on a set of web pages that you specify. If you were tracking the fourteen security-related websites mentioned in that eWeek article, an email notification from InfoMinder would look like the following example.
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Figure 1: Sample InfoMinder notification email
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InfoMinder's notification email summarizes changes on all tracked pages. The View All Changes link leads to a special page that highlights all changes on each tracked pages.
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Change tracking: sometimes, there's more than meets the eye
Clicking the View All Changes link leads to a version of the tracked page on which just the changes are highlighted. The following example shows the two changes reported for the Microsoft TechNet Security Bulletin. One of the changes appears where you'd expect to find a recent change (in the June listing), as seen in Figure 2.
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Figure 2: Monitoring the Microsoft TechNet Security Bulletin
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The MS01-033 vulnerability seems to be the only recent change to this page.
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But the other change is buried further down the page (in the January listing), as seen in Figure 3.
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Figure 3: Monitoring the Microsoft TechNet Security Bulletin, continued
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The MS01-002 vulnerability, though listed under January
changes, did not in fact appear on the page until June. |
Why did this happen? Probably, the MS01-002 item was forgotten in January, then added in June. The point is that although websites often order items chronologically, you can't really know what has changed without the kind of before-and-after comparisons that InfoMinder makes.
Syndicated news: InfoMinder can enhance and complement RSS channels
When available, syndicated newsfeeds are an excellent way to track website changes. Some of the sites on eWeek's list, including SecurityFocus.com, do offer newsfeeds that can be monitored in aggregators such as Meerkat.
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Figure 4: Tracking SecurityFocus.com in an RSS (Rich Site Summary) aggregator
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Some sites, notably technology-oriented ones, export newsfeeds that
can be searched and viewed in aggregators. Here, the viewer is Meerkat. |
In this case, InfoMinder's email summary reported the same changes reported by Meerkat. And, as shown in Figure 5, InfoMinder's View All Changes page managed to add value above and beyond what Meerkat reported, by including a summary of the Hacker Tools and their Signatures story. The summary appeared on the website, but was omitted from the newsfeed.
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Figure 5: InfoMinder can provide a richer view than that of a syndicated news feed
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InfoMinder's change view includes a helpful summary which was omitted from the RSS newsfeed.
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It's interesting to see how InfoMinder automatically gathers and presents the summary which could have been included in the newsfeed's <description> field, but wasn't.
The broader point, in any case, is that only some of the fourteen sites mentioned in the eWeek story are available as syndicated channels. InfoMinder consolidates the tracking of all the sites, whether or not they support syndication.
How it works: Using InfoMinder
Step 1: Sign up for a free account
Sign up at http://www.infominder.com. You can use the service for free to monitor up to 20 URLs. A paid version of the service supports more URLs, and offers extra features.
Step 2: Specify your Minders (URLs to track)
You can create Minders one at a time, in the web interface of the InfoMinder service or (IE users only) using a special right-click-menu shortcut. Or, you can create a batch of Minders by importing bookmarks. Here's a quick overview of the three ways to create Minders.
Method 1: Creating a Minder in the InfoMinder web interface
To create a default Minder, click Create Minder, enter the URL to track, and click Save. In this case, your Minder will inherit these defaults:
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Description: Same as URL.
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Category: This Minder is not assigned to a category.
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Email notification: Yes. You'll receive email digests from InfoMinder, summarizing changes to all the sites you're tracking.
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Notification frequency: You'll receive daily email digests.
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Change threshold: You'll be notified when there is at least one change.
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Keywords: Notification does not depend on the appearance of specified keywords in the changed text.
To adjust any these defaults, click Show Advanced Options, illustrated in Figure 6.
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Figure 6: InfoMinder's Advanced Options
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Use Advanced Options to specify categories and keywords, and to adjust
the frequency of notification and sensitivity of tracking. |
Method 2: Creating a Minder directly from Internet Explorer
If you're using Internet Explorer, you can install InfoMinder's Mind This Page assistant (see HelpFile reference TBD). Now, you don't need to visit the InfoMinder site to create a Minder. Instead, while viewing a website in IE, you can add its URL to your InfoMinder collection by just right-clicking, then selecting the Mind This Page option from IE's popup right-click menu. This instantly creates a Minder, as shown in Figure 7.
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Figure 7: Creating a Minder from Internet Explorer
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For IE users, this method is the quickest and most
convenient way to create a Minder. |
Method 3: Creating Minders by importing bookmarks
If you're already tracking sites -- in our example, security-related sites -- you've probably got a set of existing bookmarks. To use some of them, click Import Bookmarks. InfoMinder shows you how to find (or create) a file containing your current set of browser bookmarks. Then, it invites you to choose which of these you'll convert into Minderes, as shown in Figure 8.
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Figure 8: Importing bookmarks
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You can specify which of your browser bookmarks to convert into Minders.
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Step 3: Check your email
Once you've created Minders, by any of these methods, you need only check your email alerts from InfoMinder.
In some cases, InfoMinder's email digest alone (see Figure 1) tells you enough about what has changed, and there is no need to visit the changed page. In other cases, you'll want to click the View All Changes link, for one or more tracked sites, to see all changes highlighted (see Figures 2, 3, and 5).
That's all there is to it!
1 eWeek, June 11, 2001, p. 26