Have you ever wanted to monitor a website for changes?

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?