Most of the modern websites have RSS feeds available that lets you easily follow updates without leaving our feed reader.
If you are wondering what are RSS feeds, here is a great video explaining what RSS feeds are.
Unfortunately, not all websites in the Internet have RSS feeds. There have been many webpage monitoring services that will notify you when a webpage you are watching changes or updates.
Google Reader can now track changes to any web page even if there isn’t a RSS feed available. You can add any website URL to the ‘Add a subscription’ box in Google Reader. If it can’t detect a RSS feed, Google Reader will prompt and ask you if you want to ‘Create a Feed’ for this page.
Google Reader will periodically visit that page and check for changes and publish any changes in the custom feed you created for the page.
This is a great way to follow up on changes to web pages you are interested in, as a reader.
If you are a publisher and you intentionally don’t provide RSS feeds for parts of your site and don’t want Google to crawl it, you can use this link to opt-out.
Google Reader has been adding little useful features lately and this is definitely another step in the right direction.
[via Google Reader blog]
Google have sooo many cool tools it’s very difficult to keep up. Thanks for the post here – I’ve already set up a couple of my own feeds to monitor sites without RSS.
Cheers
Wendy
Google reader is improving more and more.
As for me, this new feature works for some websites but not for those which update every couple of minutes. Reader gets filled with hundreds of posts which is hard to follow.