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WatchThatPage

Summary: Tips for how to use http://www.watchthatpage.com/ with the Recent Changes page.
Version:
Prerequisites:
Status: Documentation
Maintainer: Gustav Andersson
Categories: Administration

Questions answered by this recipe

Question

Is there a way to e-mail the latest changes to the (All)RecentChanges page?

Answer

By using the services at http://www.watchthatpage.com/, you can watch any page and send the changes to that page as an e-mail to one or more people. This works very well on the AllRecentChanges page for monitoring a whole wiki. As it is a completely separate service, there is no change required to the monitored wiki, you could use it on say pmwiki.org!

  1. Go to http://www.watchthatpage.com/ and create a user account.
  2. Add a new watched web page, prefferably the AllRecentChanges page.
  3. Add the times the e-mails will be sent out, e.g. daily at 6.am or twice-daily etc.
  4. If you have a Sandbox, you may want to exclude changes to the Sandbox pages from being e-mailed out. To do that, add a filter on each paragraph that contain the word 'Sandbox'.
  5. If you have dynamically changing content on say your page footer (like an always changing quote or the time) you need to add further filters to ignore those changes, or remove them from the RecentChanges page.
  6. Add additional recipients of the e-mails, if any.

That's it! Multiple edits to the same page will not result in multiple lines in the RecentChanges page, hence won't result in multiple lines in the e-mails. If no changes are made, no changes occur on the RecentChanges page and no e-mail is sent out.

Notes

See Also

The following could be useful for the editors a wiki:

  • PmWiki has a built-in feature Notify which can send e-mails when pages are edited.
  • WatchLists Track the most recent changes to a list of pages

Contributors

Gustav Andersson

Comments