{
  "id": "2004-july-august-vigilant-program-tracks-web-changes",
  "slug": "2004-july-august-vigilant-program-tracks-web-changes",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2004-july-august-vigilant-program-tracks-web-changes.html",
  "year": 2004,
  "month": "July-August",
  "monthNum": 7,
  "headline": "Vigilant program tracks Web changes",
  "kicker": "CAR TOOL",
  "author_name": "Sarah Cohen",
  "author_title": "",
  "affiliation": "The Washington Post",
  "summary": "Website Watcher is a monitoring tool that helps journalists track changes to websites, such as FEC campaign finance filings, by ignoring irrelevant updates like timestamps and alerting users only to substantive changes.",
  "keywords": [
    "journalism",
    "monitoring",
    "automation"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Government & Politics",
    "Technology",
    "Investigative Methods"
  ],
  "technologies": [
    "Website Watcher",
    "Perl"
  ],
  "full_text": "As any journalist who has to deal with presidential campaign finance raw data can tell you, the 20th of each month this year poses a competitive nightmare. Candidates must report their monthly contributions and expenditures to the Federal Election Commission by midnight of that day. But some report a day or so early, and others miss the deadline by a few minutes.\n\nThis means that journalists might have a day to analyze and report the results or may still be waiting, at deadline, for the data. Knowing when the data is available is crucial and getting the filings as soon as they are posted on the Web becomes a competitive obsession.\n\nEnter Website Watcher. The utility is available for purchase and download at www.aignes.com. A single-use commercial license costs $99. There are several similar tools on the market. I chose Website Watcher because it was the first one I found that had a few features I needed.\n\nBasic use of the program is simple: You type a Web address for the program to check and give it a name.\n\nYou can keep adding pages. For those you want to check routinely, add them to a HotSite. For those you just want to keep track of once in a while, you can just keep it manually.\n\nAfter you enter the sites, set them to \"Autowatch,\" choose how often they should be checked and you can walk away. You can set Website Watcher to alert you of changes by playing a sound, opening the page in a browser, e-mailing a copy of the page or even running a program.\n\nThere are a few features that make this program especially good for the kind of work we journalists do.\n\nThe most important feature is the ability to ignore changes that don't matter. For example, the FEC electronic filing system re-generates the page each time it's checked. This means that technically, the page always changes.\n\nThat little phrase, \"Generated Thu May 20 11:37:54 2004\", in the page would create a new version each time the page was checked. But Website Watcher can ignore all changes in dates, ignore a phrase or pattern of characters that you define, or to do the opposite: Only count it as a change when a certain pattern appears. Here is how I've told the program to ignore this little \"Generated\" phrase.\n\nI've told Website Watcher to ignore links and images, since I know they won't include a new filing. I've also told it to ignore internal coding. But I didn't want it to ignore \"all typical date strings\", because that might be included in a new filing. Instead, I gave it a pattern to look for by checking \"Ignore userdefined strings\", then typing in this pattern.\n\nThis expression means look for the word \"Generated\", then anything, then four digits in a row. If this is the only thing that changed in the page, then Website Watcher won't consider the page changed.\n\nAnother feature I like is that the program archives the most recent copy of the page. When there is a change, Website Watcher alerts you and then saves a new copy with the changes highlighted in yellow. In this case the phrase \"(As of March 31, 2004)\" has been highlighted and formatted as italic in my viewer.\n\nFor the Bush-Cheney fund-raisers, called Pioneers, it highlights new last names. It can also show you what has been deleted from a page at the end.\n\nThere are many more advanced features I haven't explored. Among them are options to e-mail copies of the changed page and run programs, such as a Perl script, when a change is identified.\n\nBut I have to go. Website Watcher just beeped to let me know that the Bush campaign filed an amendment to its April report.",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "extracted_at": "2026-07-05",
    "verified": true
  },
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  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2004-july-august-vigilant-program-tracks-web-changes.html",
  "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2004-july-august-vigilant-program-tracks-web-changes.json"
}