owl's ramble-ons

They may make sense to you and help you get the job done, those design rules you follow. But to someone else they may sound like nonsense. Ridiculous Design Rules collects design, advertising, and fashion rules that make no sense to contributors. Some look perfectly valid to me, like that about using Helvetica. Some do look odd.

The site even offers a book for every flavor of rules. I think I want the one for design, Never Use White Type on a Black Background. The preview looks sweet.

I have been using WatchThatPage to monitor changes on pages without RSS feeds for at least 10 years, probably more. Somehow it never occurred to me that there could be similar services that did the same thing better.

WatchThatPage is fine for a few pages, but in my quest to get more involved with the art world I found out that RSS feeds on relevant web sites are absent half of the time, if not more often. And I discovered some really good web design and development blogs and forums that had no RSS feeds either. Now, artists are not always savvy, but is it that difficult to add a feed to a forum for programmers or designers? Anyway, my list of monitored pages grew and grew until it became unmanageable.

WatchThatPage sends all changes daily in one plain text email. Pages are sorted alphabetically by URL; there are no page titles. So if I needed to find a particular page (say, a specific sub-forum that had the same URL as a dozen of other sub-forums and was only distinguished by a parameter in the end), it was quite challenging.

In attempt to make my life easier I decided to open another WatchThatPage account strictly for art pages and leave design/development pages in the old account. Guess what? Updates were not coming from any art sites. I knew for a fact that there were updates; at least two art forums that I monitor are very active. WatchThatPage insisted that there were no changes. The old account that I always had worked just fine.

So off I went shopping for a new service: free, with unlimited number of pages to monitor, the one that would recognize changes when they actually happened. The first few tries turned out to be either limiting or with changes presented in some inconvenient way. Then I tried ChangeDetection.

Not only does it have everything I need, it does it better, is friendlier to a human reader, and even allows to control which changes to track on each page.

For each monitored page, there is a separate page in your account with a history of 30 most recent page updates. A title of the page is right there too, and you can even edit the original one if it’s not descriptive enough. A shrinked down version of updates shows under the date of each update. Click on the date, and you will see a cashed version of the page – new text highlighted, old text crossed over. It’s so much better than trying to figure out cryptic text snippets from a plain text email!

ChangeDetection sends a separate email for each monitored page. Updates are daily; this can’t be changed.

Days later, I am more than happy and only wonder what took me so long to find a better service.