Web page notification

[DMHamm]

It seems like I used to see a setting or an option on a web page SOMEwhere that said (essentially): "Email me when content on this page changes". I have searched this forum and on Hotscripts.com, but can find no such script.

What I would like is to have an opt-in signup on my home page: visitors could elect to enter their email address and when the site gets updated, they would get an email notification. This doesn't seem too dificult to me, but I am NOT a programmer and as I said above I haven't been able to track down a script.

Any ideas/thoughts?

 

[skiflyer]

You have several options.

Either way you'll need to just collect those emails, that's no different than collecting any other information, use cgi or perl or php or asp or whatever you choose to get that information and either store it in flat files or a database depending on your abilities and resources.

The real choice that you're left with then, is how to know if the site has changed. You could setup some sort of automatic cron job which makes a hash of your site, and if that hash is different than the last one, email the list (be certain to only hash static files, things like counters and this email list itself for example shouldn't be hashed). If you use a script to upload source changes, you could make it part of that script, if you don't want to bother people when you take out an extra   or change the background color, you could keep it as a manual process you need to intentionally notify people of.

-Rob