How to Know When a Website Updates? Use Visualping
Feb. 7, 2023
Visualping Tracks Website Updates and Pings You …
A common question I get during my newsroom trainings is: “How can I find out when and how often a website I’m tracking is updated?” This is particularly helpful for anyone who tracks government websites, where some update at specific times and dates and others sporadically.
Yes, there’s a tool that can track that, and it’s available in free and paid models. Visual ping.io makes tracking website updates easy. Just enter a URL, select frequency and how much of the page update you want to track, and it sends you an email update.
The interface is clean and easy to use. The free version gives you five free searches per day, but paid models (starting at $10 a month) offer many more.
Visualping is not alone. There are other tools that can do the same thing or something similar. Samantha Sunne at Tools for Reporters loves Distill.io. It does many of the same things that VisualPing does but it also tracks updates to PDFs on a page as well. That’s helpful if you’re tracking government sites that store a lot of PDFs in its archives.
Training Video
Learn how to use Visualping.io to track a website
Around the Web
Artificial Intelligence in Local News: A Survey of US Newsrooms’ AI Readiness
Download a free .PDF of The Associated Press’ groundbreaking report that provides important insights into local news outlets’ understanding of artificial intelligence and their readiness to use AI to meet their journalism and business needs.TRFilter
This tool from Thomson Reuters allows users to document and manage online harassment and abuse, so they can take control of their social media feeds and focus on their professional activities.Reuters Institute at Oxford: How Publishers are Learning to Create and Distribute News on TikTok
Read/download this in-depth report from the Reuters Institute from December 2022.
Language, Please
A living resource for all journalists and storytellers seeking to thoughtfully cover evolving social, cultural and identity-related topics. With guidance, tools, and access to inclusivity readers, it offers the necessary context to help newsrooms make informed decisions about the language we use.
Data + Journalism Textbook
Samantha Sunne and I co-authored a textbook, “Data + Journalism” that’s available now on Routledge. (Order here). It’s an introductory to intermediate-level guide to learning data storytelling from A to Z.
It features examples, interviews, links to tools and dozens of practical exercises to learn how to find, scrape, clean, visualize and write with data. We also explore ethics, transparency and basic math skills. Sunne offers a bonus chapter — Chapter 13 — on diversity and inclusion for free on our blog.
Sunne also previews some of the tools from the book on her Tools for Reporters site.
In Quotes …
“Eventually, the more important thing is how the public, whether we call them readers or viewers or listeners or whatever they are, they’re going to have to figure out some sort of common sensse way of separating the wheat from the chaff.” – Austin Kipliner, SPJ Fellow of the Society
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The PageProbe browser extension (Chromium browsers) allows monitoring of unlimited number of websites for free. After installing the extension, right click on the specific area of the website you want to monitor and then say Track Content. For actions add notification and show difference and then you will be alerted when a change occurs