NETMIND'S MIND-IT

For monitoring changes on specific Web pages, NetMind offers its free Mind-It service. Formerly known as URL-Minder, Mind-It offers an impressive beginning to the kinds of current awareness tools that can be made available on the Web. As a free service, Mind-It (http://mindit.netmind.com) acts as an advertisement for NetMind's commercial product, Enterprise Minder, a full-fledged version designed with more powerful capabilities for the corporate intranet.
On the free side, Mind-It tracks Web pages. After registering and setting up some URLs, Mind-It sends email when the registered Web pages have changed. While the basic principle is fairly straightforward, Mind-It comes with a number of options, including the ability to set the frequency, the part of the page to check, and what kind of notification to deliver. Mind-It can also be configured to send a message when the Web page moves or when it ceases to exist.

The addresses for several pages can be added on one Multiple Pages form or one at a time. Mind-It provides an option to describe the page and to categorize it into a Mind-It folder, which enables the user to group similar current awareness settings together. The pages can be checked daily, every other day, or weekly. After Mind-It compares the old page to the current page and finds a difference, it sends an email notification. It can even send the new page as an attachment.

Many Web pages change daily. Sometimes it's just a date, graphic, or advertisement that changes while the real information content remains static. Mind-It provides several options to address situations like this and provides more flexibility in what part of a Web page is monitored. This Tracking feature, as Mind-It calls it, defaults to sending a notification if there is any kind of change on the page. But it also offers tracking by Keywords, Text, Images/Links, Bounded Text, Surrounded Text, and Form Results.

Select the tracking of Keywords, and Mind-It will only send a notification if one of the specified keywords or phrases changes, is removed, or is added. For example, set up a Mind-It profile to watch for the phrase "bug fixes" or just the word "patch" on the Windows 98 update page and when a bug fix or patch becomes available, Mind-It can send you an email notification. To only track a portion of a page, use the Text tracking option and then copy and paste the exact section of text from the page that should be tracked.

The Images/Links option is the only one that tracks changes to the underlying HTML code. All the others simply monitor changes to the information content and ignore changes to the HTML coding. To monitor changes to image names or to any of the links on a page, use Images/Links tracking.

For more sophisticated tracking, Mind-It offers Bounded Text and Surrounded Text. The Bounded Text prompts for a beginning and ending phrase to watch, while the Surrounded Text prompts for a phrase and the number of words before and after it to monitor. Form tracking is the last of the specialized tracking options. This can be used to monitor how the output of a form might change. For example, form tracking makes it possible to be notified of changes to the results of a specific AltaVista or HotBot search. It monitors changes to the output of a form submitted with a specific set of criteria.

USES FOR MIND-IT:
Mind-It's many features--the various tracking capabilities, the ability to change the frequency of the monitoring, and the categorizing within folders--make it an easy tool for managing multiple current awareness profiles. However, some kinds of Web pages lend themselves to Mind-It's service better than others.
Organizations' pages that offer an archive of press releases or any other kinds of periodic announcements make excellent candidates for Mind-It. Infrequently updated pages that you would not typically visit on a daily basis are other possibilities for a Mind-It list. Pages that change daily and warrant daily visits are not.

In this free version, one major complaint is that the email notifications do not note what the specific change is. That capability is available in its commercial Enterprise Minder product. One work-around for Mind-It users is to save a copy of the page on a local computer, and then use that file to compare with the updated version when you are next notified of a change. Or for another alternative, monitor the same page with javElink.



post by santan...30th...july......