Have you ever wanted to monitor a website for changes?  Perhaps you just can't wait until the very next change to (Name Your Favorite Web Site) to occur.  Perhaps you just want to monitor a web page so that you are alerted to any errors.  What ever the case, this free download might be for you.   Click here to install.

Here for your downloading pleasure is a small and nifty gadget that will monitor any web page for any changes.  I've named this gadget RadPop.  Once a change has occurred on the web page that you are monitoring you will receive a pop-up like the one displayed in the picture below.   The picture below is displayed in a continuous loop; it is showing how it slides up from the system tray.  It also slides back down after a configurable amount of time and you can simply click it closed with the red x.  It is designed to not toally distract you but rather catch your eye. 

 <--The application hides in your system tray when minimized and at startup.

The RadPop application  is just right of my red blinking camera above.   The message displayed in the pop-up area is also clickable and will take you directly to the web page that you are monitoring.   RadPop is designed to hide and not be annoying and only becomes noticeable if a change occurs on the web page that you are monitoring.   If you leave the defaults after you install you should notice it activate a pop-up in a few minutes.  By default it monitors a html page on my site that is already programmed to change every minute. This is a good way to test it out before changing the settings. 

I have been using my RadPop application at work for a couple of years to monitor a seven server web farm.  Our servers are load balanced by a product called Radware.  This hardware router has a webpage of its own that displays the current status of each individual server.  If this status web page were to ever change then one of our seven servers has either moved out of or into the server load.  If the router has removed a server from load balancing then I want to know about it!  However there are six more servers doing the exact same thing, so no rush I just need to quickly check what happened.

RadPop is very customizable Web Monitor. 

Below is the configuration panel where you can make changes to what is monitored and how the pop-up should appear.

Dot Net Blogs free application. 

I started this Web Monitor project a few years ago after following a Project on Code Project.  Thanks to John O'Byrne for the original slick popup.  My contribution has been to allow users to enter a url and select how often to monitor the site.  Additionally I have created a "Save My Settings" button and the last saved settings are reloaded at startup.  

The program starts by getting the stored settings from an xml file.   It then takes a finger print or a MD5 hash of the web site to be monitored.  It starts up a reoccurring counter and waits until it needs to look again at the web site for changes.  When RadPop again looks at the web site it gets another MD5 Hash of the web page and now compares it to see if they are the same.  If they are the same it continues otherwise a pop-ups will occur in one of three different looking styles.  

This has been a really fun program to write and is a really good VB.Net beginners program.  I can think of a dozen enhancements that could be done to it.  This is  the reason I have released it here as a Click Once deploy.  If I ever get a good reason to enhance this application further the people that have downloaded the application from my Click Once page will get the revised version the next time they run RadPop.

But what I really hope is that if someone else changes the code to do even more cool things and has a learning experience for themselves.  So I have included my source for download here.   A future addition could be the ability to monitor multiple sites or make the monitoring part proxy aware.  Anyone care to take up the cause?

Finding DVD & CD covers on the internet can be a pain with all the advertisements and clicking you have to do.  Not many of the sites out there make this task enjoyable.   I have 17,000+ custom dvd covers here on my site.  I will use Usenet to continually update my site.   I will also add an upload link if people are interested.  I will only be focusing on the actual DVD or CD printable covers.  Not going to add labels for the boxes.  Who prints box covers anyhow?

I’ve done a smart little interface for the searching itself (Click Here).  As you type I give a list of auto completed files that match.  I also do wildcards on both sides of the name that you enter.  If you leave partial names without completing it from the dropdown I pull back all of the thumbnails that matches.  Clicking on the thumbnail will enlarge the image to the full size for downloading.  Below you can see that I have almost completed the search for “Disney” and that the auto complete kicked in.  At this point I can select one from the list or press enter and pull back all the thumbnails.  Nice eh?

custom dvd covers

If you are the kind of person that makes copies and prints directly to DVD or CD’s then I hope you have run across Super Media Store.  This is where I have bought all my DVD’s and Ink for the past 5 years.  These guys are great and this is not a paid for endorsement!    Also note that you should be printing directly to the DVD itself not an adhesive label. Look for a new printer that can print directly to the DVD itself (Click Here).  The adhesive labels can cause you problems in the long run and the cost of a printer will likely save you from destroying a dvd player at some point.