Auto-Refresh Any Website

Auto-Refresh Any Website At Regular Intervals To Monitor Changes

Auto Web Page Refresh Software is a Windows app by Danaav that, as its name implies, automatically refreshes web pages to take the hassle out of keeping track of their updated content. It comes with its own web browser, which refreshes any web page that you navigate to at regular intervals. You can define how often a website should be refreshed in seconds and how many times it should be refreshed before it stops. It’s a very simple utility that you can use to monitor feeds or new content on websites that do not support live updates. Since it comes with its own browser, you will be able to keep your regular web browsing tasks separate from the page you want to monitor and your browser’s performance will not be dragged down.

You can plow right through the app’s installation because Auto Web Page Refresh Software doesn’t try and trick you into installing bloatware. Once installed, the app developer’s home page will open in its own browser along with a window for you to edit the URL and define refresh intervals.

Enter the URL of the page you want to monitor. You don’t have to include HTTP or ‘www’ before the domain name. Enter the refresh interval in number of seconds and the maximum number of times a page should refresh. Entering 0 will simply disable it. Click ‘OK’ when you’re done.

To change the URL or modify the refresh interval later, go to File > Change URL to recall the settings window. Closing Auto Web Page Refresh Software’s browser window will exit the app.

Auto Web Page Refresh Software works well, but you will notice that the browser is bare bones. It will ask you to install Flash when required and will not be able to block pop ups at all.

The refresh interval can only be defined in terms of seconds, and while it’s a good idea to use the smallest unit for more regular intervals, it would be just as reasonable if a user could define the refresh interval in minutes and hours. Unless you’re reading a live blog, or going through your Twitter timeline, it is rare that you would want to refresh a page that often. You could, of course, always calculate the number of seconds in larger time intervals, but it would be much more convenient if the app did that for you.

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Monitey Monitors A Website’s Status & Notifies You When It’s Down

Have you ever wondered if your website is up and running as it should be, and everyone from around the world can access it perfectly? It’s a waste of time and effort if you put a lot of content on your site but it remains inaccessible to your visitors. Even though you can employ web services like DownForEveryOneOrJustMe (yeah, that’s a long name, I know) and other such tools for the purpose, they’re only good for manually checking the status of a website. In case you want to constantly monitor a website and get instantly notified upon any outage, Monitey might be just what you’re looking for. This free Windows application monitors any URL in the background, keeping a detailed log of its status and in addition, it notifies you whenever the URL goes offline. The application can be quite useful for all website owners who want to continuously monitor the online status of their web server. Let’s see how it works!

Note: Monitey’s installer comes with a pile of bloatware including browser toolbars and search engine replacements. Make sure you don’t install any third-party tools, apps and other such utilities by selecting Custom Installation and unmarking all these items during setup.

The application comprises of a pretty straight-forward interface and doesn’t bother you with any complicated settings. When launched, all you have to do is enter the URL of the website you want to monitor, and click ‘Start Monitoring’. By default, the application monitors the website automatically after every minute, but you can specify a custom frequency as well. For example, if you replace 1 with 10, Monitey will check the status every ten minutes. The Logs section at the bottom provides you with a summary of the website status for previous attempts. It displays the last checked time and date, along with availability status of the site. If the website goes offline (or you provide a wrong URL), you get a notification stating “The remote name could not be resolved”.

You can also save URLs for monitoring by clicking ‘Saved Websites’ and manually entering the site address. This allows monitoring multiple sites at the same time, and saves you the hassle of reentering a website’s address into the app in the future. Lastly, Monitey allows to save the log files in TXT format for any further analysis. To do this, simply click the ‘Save Log’ button and select the destination directory for saving the file.

To sum it up, Monitey is a brilliant, light-weight tool that does what it’s supposed to in the most simple and straight-forward manner. The application works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Testing was carried out on Windows 8 Pro, 64-bit edition.

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How To Use Firefox’s Web Developer Tools

Firefox’s Web Developer menu contains tools for inspecting pages, executing arbitrary JavaScript code, and viewing HTTP requests and other messages. Firefox 10 added an all-new Inspector tool and updated Scratchpad.

Firefox’s new web developer features, in combination with awesome web-developer add-ons like Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar, make Firefox an ideal browser for web developers. All tools are available under Web Developer in Firefox’s menu.

Page Inspector

Inspect a specific element by right-clicking it and selecting Inspect (or pressing Q). You can also launch the Inspector from the Web Developer menu.

You’ll see a toolbar at the bottom of the screen, which you can use to control the inspector. Your selected element will be highlighted and other elements on the page will be dimmed.

If you want to choose a new element, click the Inspect button on the toolbar, hover your mouse over the page and click your element. Firefox highlights the element under your cursor.

You can navigate between parent and child elements by clicking the breadcrumbs on the toolbar.

HTML Inspector

Click the HTML button to view the HTML code of the currently selected element.

The HTML inspector allows you to expand and collapse the HTML tags, making it easy to visualize at a glance. If you want to see the page’s HTML in a flat file, you can select View Page Source from the Web Developer menu.

CSS Inspector

Click the Style button to see the CSS rules applied to the selected element.

There’s also a CSS properties panel — switch between the two by clicking the Rules andProperties buttons. To help you find specific properties, the properties panel includes a search box.

You can edit the element’s CSS on the fly from the Rules panel. Uncheck any of the check boxes to deactivate a rule, click the text to change a rule, or add your own rules to the element at the top of the pane. Here, I’ve added the font-weight: bold; CSS rule, making the element’s text bold.

JavaScript Scratchpad

The Scratchpad also saw an update with Firefox 10, and now contains syntax highlighting. You can type in JavaScript code to run on the current page.

Once you have, click the Execute menu and select Run. The code runs in the current tab.

Web Console

The Web Console replaces the old Error Console, which has been deprecated and will be removed in a future version of Firefox.

The console displays four different types of messages, which you can toggle the visibility of — network requests, CSS error messages, JavaScript error messages and web developer messages.

What’s a web developer message? It’s a message printed to the window.console object. For example, we could run the window.console.log(“Hello World”); JavaScript code in the Scratchpad to print a developer message to the console. Web developers can integrate these messages into their JavaScript code to help with debugging.

Refresh the page and you’ll see the generated network requests and other messages.

Use the search box to filter the messages; click a request if you want to see more details.

As of Firefox 10, the Web Console can work in tandem with the Page Inspector. The $0 variable represents the currently selected object in the inspector. So, for example, if you wanted to hide the currently selected object, you could run $0.style.display=”none” in the console.

If you’re interested in learning more about using the console and its built-in functions, check out the Web Console page on Mozilla’s Developer Network website.

Get More Tools

The Get More Tools option takes you to the Web Developer’s Toolbox add-on collection on the Mozilla Add-Ons website. It contains some of the best add-ons for web developers, including Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar.