Is this possible?

I don't know anything about programming so I don't even know if this is possible:

I would like to be notified when a web page has up-dated on someone elses site. A little like an RSS feed would work but the pages I'm keen on don't have RSS enabled.

Is this possible?

If so, can anyone recommend software that does this?

Thanks in advance!

 

How does your site not have RSS enabled? RSS enabled should be on the end user side, not on your side. As long as the end user can view RSS feeds, then you can produce RSS Feeds for your web site.

And yes, it is possible to make a script to detect when a site updates.

 

You will have to make a script which get contents of a file. file_get_contents() will be handy, then put its content into DB, then make a cron job to run this script on some specific time, every time script will fetch content of page. Compare new contents with old one. If there is a different between both, this mean website has been updated.

If you need further help, please reply here, I will try to explain it with more details and code example.

 

I think, contents could differ
For example, counter or random resources list will notify, that site was updates, but in real it doesn't
If you need to check the site for specific content update, then site parser must be written

 

Off course intoex, I totally agree you. Parser is must to get the actual contents.
OFF TOPIC : I remember, once I created a parser, which was parsing football score from a website and displaying on other site. That website change a bit of format, my parse was then displaying something really terrible

 

Thanks for the advice guys, much appreciated.

I am designing an industry news blog, which needs me to keep an eye on the "News page" of 200+ web sites.

Like I mentioned before, I have no programming skills. Is this something avalible to buy? Can anyone recommend a programmer that could write this for me?

Thanks again.

 

Hey buddy, you just can't buy such a script. Even if you hire a programmer for this, he will have to write a parser for each website (i.e. 200+), this will be too expensive for you.

The only and easiest way is RSS, so drop those websites for 200, which don't provide RSS.

 

Best thing you can do is get the rss feeds from these news websites and display them on your site. You can use a rss feeds parser to display the feeds.