Femtoo - New Feature - Scheduling your trackers

Yesterday, a new version of Femtoo was released which included a very useful new feature: Tracker Scheduling.

Tracker Scheduling means that you can now specify when you want your trackers to run, not just how often. This means you can configure your trackers to minimize the number of 'Checks Per Month' you use.

For example, let's say you want to track a niche job board which advertises new positions for jobs and that you know the job positions are posted each morning around 10am. Before, you would have had to create a tracker that runs every 30 minutes and hope that it happens to run soon after 10am to notify you quickly of the latest job positions - this would work, but is far from ideal. With Tracker Scheduling you could simply configure your tracker to run once per day at exactly 10am (or to be safe, sometime shortly after 10am). Now your tracker is using many many fewer 'Checks Per Month' and is checking for content changes exactly when you want.

To use the new Tracker Scheduling feature, create or edit a tracker and click the 'Schedule next run' field. A date and time selection widget should appear and you can select the exact time for the next tracker run. The tracker will then run periodically based on the selected tracker frequency. So in the example above, I would choose a 'tracker frequency' of '24 hours' and I would choose a 'Schedule next run' time of 10:10 am and date as either this day or the next. Once saved, the tracker will run at 10:10am every day.

Another great feature requested by, and implemented for Femtoo users.

Tracking multiple page content with Femtoo

The latest release of Femtoo (http://femtoo.com) brings a welcome addition to the 'Tracker Editor' - Simple-to-use multiple content selection.

Femtoo users can now find a new button, labelled "Select additional part of the page". When this button is pushed, a second selector field appears and is automatically activated - meaning that you can now point-and-select an additional part of the web to track.

Femtoo has long had multiple-selection ability, but was always a bit fiddly to use. The new "Select additional part of the page" button makes the powerful Femtoo multiple-selection feature easy for everyone.

Why would you need to select and track multiple parts of a web page? If you are tracking a product page, with a single tracker you can track the price, stock quantity and discount information. Of if you are tracking a news website, which often has various sections, you can track several news headlines with a single tracker.

Femtoo is one of the most powerful, full-featured and reliable web page tracking systems on the Internet, why not give it a try?

Femtoo - Introducing a brand new 'Tracker Editor'

The new Femtoo tracker editor has finally been launched. It is a complete replacement from the previous 'modal dialog' design and the new implementation user a full page, giving much more space to select content and also allows more experienced users faster access to settings and configuration.

And now that the new tracker editor is in place, we hope to start making big improvements, specifically to help with the selection and tracking of multiple page elements.

Femtoo - The best web page tracker looking better than ever

The focus of Femtoo has always been about performance, stability and powerful content tracking features. However... from a visual point of view, Femtoo has never been particularly appealing...

Until now! Femtoo has just had a well deserved 'look and feel' overhaul. Although the work was only really some basic style changes, the effect is dramatic and we are sure that people will enjoy using Femtoo much more.

Track online file changes with Femtoo.com

We are very pleased to announce a really useful new Femtoo feature: File Tracking

With Femtoo you can now effortlessly track changes to any online files such as PDF documents, images and videos.

This very useful feature and allows you to track changes to content that was previously impossible. For example, you can now track changes to graphs and charts of data, maps, diagrams and a whole variety of content found in PDF documents, such as product catalogues, price lists, terms and conditions.

Tracking file changes is simply and effortless. Try Femtoo for free and see for yourself...

Femtoo - Now with Annual Subscriptions

The latest version of Femtoo.com supports Annual Subscriptions, in addition to the previous monthly subscriptions.

Annual Subscriptions offer two advantages over monthly subscriptions:

1. They are cheaper over the course of a year than paying monthly
2. An annual subscription may fit better with your companies invoicing and budgeting processes

However, monthly subscriptions, although slightly more expensive, are more flexible.

All Femtoo subscriptions are handled by PayPal which gives Femtoo customers security, confidence and the power to manage their own subscriptions.

Femtoo now with Pushover.net integration for mobile notifications

It was a great shame to see the end of Notifo.com - a great service brought to us by a great guy (Chad Etzel).

However, Femtoo has now integrated another great service - the fantastic Pushover.net mobile notification service.

Pushover charges a few dollars for their mobile phone application, which runs on both Android and iOS devices - but it is definitely worth it. The application itself is very high quality, integrates well and works exactly as it should.

However, what the Pushover app really gives you is a world of up-to-the-minute notifications from almost any source - including Femtoo.com - the web page tracking and notification service (which is free by the way).

If you already have a Pushover account, Femtoo is a really great complimentary 'app', and if you already have Femtoo, the Pushover integration means you can now enjoy web page change notifications on your mobile phone, anytime, anywhere...

Building an open, accessible and event driven Internet

First off, I just want to give my view of the Intenet. I believe there are two reasons why the Internet is successful, or rather why it hasn't yet become just another failed or obsolete technology:

1. HTTP is a brilliantly engineered protocol that has proven successful throughout the history of the Internet (albeit a short history).
2. The enormous amount of careful and hard work that went into developing HTML and controlling 'web standards'.

Although, thanks to the continual attempts by Microsoft to derail and dissolve web standards, I believe we are 10 years behind where we could have been today. Fortunately, the appeal of an 'open' and 'standardised' Internet was so overwhelming that even the mighty Microsoft now find themselves at a disavantaged position having choosen a negative and destructive policy rather than assuming a supportive and innovation led role.

Rather than attack on Microsoft, I would cite this as an example of how little tolerance the Internet has toward anyone attempting to control or bend it for their own profit. In comparison, Google took the opposite view - By helping the Internet become a 'better place', they have become an extremely successful and profitable company and continue to live up to their "Don't be evil" motto.

With regard to the topic of Facebook and the controvasy that surrounds privacy policies and the 'evil empire' etc - I wouldn't worry too much, it would take 30 seconds to register to an alternative social network if people weren't happy with Facebook. We should also remember that over ten years ago we were all signing up to 'friendsreunited' and 'myspace', so gated online communities are not new, after all a social network is just an elaborate forum. I say this because do not like the idea of building an Internet on top of the Internet, I believe it defeats the purpose of the Internet and is largely pointless as HTTP is well-known, well-understood, powerful and incredibly prolific protocol. I had always thought Google Wave was doomed to failure, not because it wasn't an impressive technology, but it simply didn't seem to offer anything new - except a big learning curve.

One of the main motivations behind Femtoo was to make a positive move toward a more open, accesible, event-driven Internet. I'll define these term:

• Open -  Allowing access to lots of data
• Accesible - Prodiving easy, convenient, standard and well-documented access to structured content
• Event-driven - The ability for web applictions to communicate asyncronously with each other via a system of events and callbacks

Why not add 'real-time' to the list? Because the Internet has always been 'real-time'. If I were to publish changes to this blog post, those changes would be reflected on the Internet instantly. The part that generally is not real-time are indexed search results etc - but the 'Internet' can not be blamed for this!

Some core concepts behind Femtoo could be summarized with these sentences:

• Treat the Internet as a rich, accessible database
• Treat a change in Internet content as a single event
• Reference individual parts of a page with a unique URL (not just the entire page)
• Treat the Internet as a single enormous 'workflow' engine.

Ok, but Femtoo is just a webpage tracking and notification system, right? Yes. But I believe it is also an interesting step toward facilitating all of the objectives listed above.

Femtoo allows you to pull out a single piece of data from within a webpage. This single piece of data can then be directly referenced via a single URL, for example this URL always references the latest jQuery version (parsed as a number).

When you create a tracker in Femtoo, have the option of specifying an HTTP Callback URL. So when the tracker detects a change in content (for example a new jQuery version), Femtoo effectively creates an event and fires a pre-configured 'callback' along with the details of the content change.

Because you can track pretty much any textual conent with Femtoo, you can point Femtoo at another web service, monitor the results and fire an event to a 'listener' web service. In this case, Femtoo would almost acting like the 'controller' part of an MVC architecture, but on the scale of the Internet. Futhermore, this process could be one part of a series of 'inter-service' events that constitute an 'Internet Workflow Engine'.

At the moment, most websites are just a collection of static webpage that contain unstructure content. For this reason, Femtoo has to 'poll' webpages to 'artificially' fire events, which is far from ideal. However, if websites were to become 'service friendly' and actively fired events upon content change, then the Internet could start to get really interesting...

Thanks Google - Google Reader to stop change tracking - I said it was hard than it looks!

Today on the official Google Reader blog it was announced that Google will withdraw their change tracking feature.

This is good news for Femtoo.com - the service that provides possibly the most sophisticated webpage change tracking and notification system on the web.

As I say, tracking webpage changes is more difficult than it may first appear - and although Google has given it a good shot, it would seem that some things are best left to the experts :-)

If you want to be notified of specific changes to webpages, try Femtoo.com - it's free, powerful and very cool!

CSS Selectors: Real world examples

1. BBC News Headline

Website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/
CSS Selector: A.tsh,A.tshsplash

2. Price of an Amazon.com item

Example 1: http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Satellite-L505-GS5037-TruBrite-15-6-Inch/dp/B0030INLSW/ref=dp_ob_title_ce?ie=UTF8&qid=1267628403&sr=1-2
Example 2: http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Wireless-Reading-Display-Generation/dp/B0015T963C/ref=dp_ob_title_def
CSS Selector:B.priceLarge

3. Item count of an eBay auction search for "ferrari"

Website: http://motors.shop.ebay.co.uk/Cars-/9801/i.html?_nkw=ferrari&_catref=1&_fln=1&_trksid=p3286.c0.m282
CSS Selector:SPAN.countClass

CSS Selectors: Cheat Sheet

'Class' selectors

.headline - select every element that has the 'headline' class.

'Tag' selectors

p - select every paragraph on the page.
a - select every link/anchor on the page.
h1 - select every Heading 1 tag on the page.

'Id' selectors

#item-price - select the element that has the 'id' "item-price".

'Nth element' selectors

p:eq(0) - select only the first paragraph.
a:eq(4) - select the fifth 'anchor' tag on the page.
.menu-item:eq(3) - select only the forth element that contains the 'menu-item' class.

Combined selectors

h1, p - select every h1 tag AND every paragraph tag.
h3.subtitle - select every h3 tag that contains a 'subtitle' class.
h3:eq(0), a.news-link - select the first h3 tag AND every anchor tag that has the 'news-link' class.

CSS Selectors: The Basics

This post will demonstrate ways to use 'CSS Selectors' (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/selector.html) to target parts of a webpage that you wish to track.

There are three basic ways of identifying parts of a webpage using css selectors:

1. Element 'Tag'
2. Element 'ID'
3. Element 'Class'

Let's give a quick practical example of each of three ways of identifying content:

1. 'Tag' - a tag is the name given to the type of structural element. For example in a typical webpage 'normal' text is often placed with 'paragraph' tags like this:

<p>This is the first paragraph</p>
<p>This is the second paragraph</p>

If we wanted to select all of the paragraphs in a webpage, our 'CSS Selector' would simply be p.

?? other examples of tag selection

<h1>foo</h1>

2. 'ID' - Every structural tag in a webpage can have defined an optional 'id' attribute. Within a single webpage no two elements should have the same 'id'. Therefore an 'id' should point directly to a single element somewhere in the page.  For example

<p>here is a paragraph of text<p>
<p id="error-message">This is an error message!</p>

If we just want to extract the error message our selector would simply be #error-message. The '#' symbol is important and tells Femtoo that we are looking for an id.

3. 'Class' - Every webpage tag can contain a 'class'. Actually, they can contain as many classes as you want. Here is an example of how classes might be used in a navigation menu in a webpage:

<ul id="menu">
<li class="menu-item"><a href="#">Products</a></li>
<li class="menu-item selected"><a href="#">Services</a></li>
<li class="menu-item"><a href="#">Contact Us</a></li>
</ul>

...well sort of... actually using .selected might not be specific enough - this means that we would end up selecting the content of every single element on the page that contains a 'selected' class. In our example, a better selector might be: .menu-item.selected - which means retrieve all elements that contain both the 'selected' class and the 'menu-item' class. Actually, we can be even more specific with #menu .menu-item.selected. By using the #menu selector we are ensuring that we will not accidentally select other items in the page that also have the classes 'menu-item' and 'selected'

Tracking Internet Content - The Femtoo Way

My name is Thomas Carnell - the creator of Femtoo. This is my first ever Blog Post so I'm sure it will go through many revisions and is probably a terrible read - please feel free to comment on the contant and my writing style!

This article gives a basic overview of how to track Internet content using Femtoo (http://www.femtoo.com).

There are three key steps to create a useful Femtoo Tracker:

1. Know what information you want to track,
2. Find a web page that clearly contains this information,
3. Proceed to create the Tracker in Femtoo

The first point is very important and will help you find a web page that contains the information you are after. We will take a closer look at the following examples:

• A) To be notified when a particular shop product is back in stock
• B) To be notified when my favourite cartoonist has published a new cartoon
• C) To be notified when a new version of my favourite music software is released
• more....

Example A - Product stock level

If I want to track the stock level of a product from a particular shop, I must find the 'product page' for that item, fire up Femtoo and create a tracker for that page - selecting the 'Number in Stock' field (or whatever it might be. You may  also set a Tracker Rule that specifies to only notify me if the stock level is greater than 0 - implying that the shop has got some more stock in and the item is once again available to purchase. In exactly the same way, you may wish to track the price of key items of your competitors and simply be notified of any change.

Example B - Newly published cartoon

Lets have a look at the second example above, and use Dilbert (http://www.dilbert.com/) as an example. So we want to be notified every time there is a new Dilbert comic strip . For this, we need to find some piece of information on this page that 'implies' that a new comic has been published. So we could try to find the following pieces of information:

• Comic Title
• Published Date
• Number of comic strip

If we take a look at the Dilbert page we can see that the comic strips don't seem to have titles, so we can't use Comic Title as a 'handle'. However there is a date just above the comic (eg "November 26, 2009") - so maybe we can tell Femtoo to track the comic date? And yes, the Femtoo Tracker wizard tells us that the 'CSS Selector' for the date is 'DIV.STR_DateStrip' and Femtoo can successfully locate and track this item. Great, so we're done - we will now be notified every time a new Dilbert comic is published.

Example C - Tracking software versions

Let's consider tracking the latest version of the amazing jQuery javascript library (http://jQuery.com/). Okay, so we need to find somewhere that clearly states the latest version. After some hunting around, we can see the latest version number detailed in a few different pages:

• http://jQuery.com/
• http://code.google.com/p/jqueryjs/downloads/list
• http://docs.jQuery.com/Downloading_jQuery

...So which page do we use to build our Femtoo Tracker? You should try to choose the page that is likely to be more 'reliable'. In this sense 'reliable' means when the content is clearly displayed and contained inside it's own specific part of the page - this generally means that the content will be less effected by other changes and updates to the page.

From looking at the above three pages, I would say that the best option would be to use http://jQuery.com/. If we take a look at this page we can see (in red writing just below the download button) that the latest version is "1.3.2". By using the Femtoo Tracker wizard we can extract the text "Current Release: v.1.3.2" - this is fine and when this text changes we can hope that it implies a tasty new version of jQuery is available to download! But it may also imply (for example) that the text has changed from "Current Release: v.1.3.2" to "Latest Release: v.1.3.2"...

However, by setting a Tracker Rule, we can tell Femtoo that we want the content to be a 'number' and specify that we only be notified when this number is greater than "132". By specifying content as a number, Femtoo will attempt to extract any valid number from any given text - in this case given the text "Current Release: v.1.3.2", Femtoo will extract "132" - pretty neat, eh?

Conclusion

Femtoo gives you the tools to accurately pin-point specific parts of a page that mean something to you. The key is to know what you want to track and where to find the information - Femtoo will handle the rest.