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

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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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Journalist's Toolbox

How to Know When a Website Updates? Use…