Routine Order

Web sites that don’t provide an RSS feed with updates annoy the hell out of me. I mean, do they think we are still living in the 90’s or what? I have been searching for a solution that tracks changes to web pages and automatically notifies me of the change through email. I finally found a great solution: changedetect - webpage monitoring services. They offer a one-click webpage monitoring system:

No logins are required to setup web page monitoring with ChangeDetect…
In fact, you do not even have to visit the ChangeDetect website at all…
Just surf the web as you normally do and, with one-click, monitor your favorite web pages and save as you go.

It is totally free, and has some really cool change monitoring features - my favorites are auto-login and support for https websites too. So you can monitor protected pages which require a login. The benefits of changedetect include improved privacy and a highly adaptable feature set. This is a LOT more than what I was looking for, and amazingly enough, it is free! They also have an extensive list of frequently asked questions for all of your questions.

I really love it when someone takes a tool beyond being cheap hack to a well-document, feature-rich utility like changedetect.com. I wonder why I never heard of it before or read about it. Hope this article comes in handy for others who are looking for a similar tool.

Wilfing is the new term that describes aimless browsing on the Internet. I am told WILF stands for “What Was I Looking For?”

Nice! Someone had to invent a name for this phenomenon that is everywhere, and affecting just about everyone.

“However, our study shows that although people log on with a purpose, they are now being offered so much choice and online distraction that many forget what they are there for, and spend hours aimlessly wilfing instead.”

Read Britons waste online time wilfing: study - Yahoo News for more details.

This trick amazes me when I think about it - oh why did it not occur to me sooner!

You can translate a page from one language to the same language using Google. For example you can translate this website from English to English! - Here are the results.

The URL, if you notice it is:
http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=routineorder.com

The “en|en” specifies that the site has to be translated from “English” to “English”. Of course, now you must think I am crazy - how will this help you cut across that corporate firewall, or your dad’s firewall, or the Great Internet Wall of ?

Easy, the translated page is a cached(sort-of) version. So bingo, just ask Google to translate the page from whatever language to the same language and you’re all set!

If you forget the URL, you can always go to http://www.google.com/translate_t and use the tool there to translate the webpage from one language to another. If necessary, change the URL in the browser to make the languages the same.