S
@LonM
I don't know how this Patreon site is currently made. But I can answer about my use of Updatescanner extension into Firefox with its assets and its lacks.
About login
All sites have now some checkbox asking if you want to remember the login. I do that for one of forum site of mine where obviously no rss feed is, and if cookies or others stuffs are not deleted, then the monitoring reads the thread list of mine, and even if these technical cookies dissapears, and so the site can't be entered, then the page changes from the site itself and monitoring also alerts you.
About the 30 days time limitation, i think the problem disapears since the monitoring correctly set to a day by week for instance, let the site believe that you log each week.
About focusing only just one part of the page, or ignoring part of this same page (which is more or less the same)
-Into UpdateScanner, a basic extension, you can control more or less and basicly what you want setting the changing character threshold from which the monitoring system is warning you, and the frequence of the automaticaly reading. If you know the site, you know the parts which are changing or not : if the machine is reading the site each day, and you set to react to a medium character changing number, then the result is often quite good even if sometimes you have to be alerted for false changing anyway, but this is better than reading the page yourself each day.
-I don't know technicaly how these monitoring extensions run. But I suspect that special html tags are excluded like ads, comments or images.
-About a lack that a lot of the Updatescanner's users notice is the feature to exclude area : that means when you set the monitoring for the page, you would be able to mark what html block is not read like quick news threads that is frequent into sites. But this demands a graphicaly interface that is a huge programmation for a an extension maker (even it may be copied from the firefox screenshot tool that remarkably do a mouse and graphicaly interface for html block marking). I don't know if instead a more comfortable graphical interface, only a field with html text indicator could do that for a good start but surely for advanced users anyway…
I strongly believe that monitoring should be shown to users only as a graphical thumbnail like rss feed managers do (like into this image) mixing both rss information and monitoring results (with a different color to distinguish them maybe). Indeed, in common use, the users should not be warned about technicaly stuffs : they don't want to care how the new information is coming from, they already did that setting rss feed or the monitoring system, they rely on their computer to do that for them, and then they only want to deal with the new content.
The distill web monitor extension does more or less that. But I don't like the way it shows html comparison result as only a kind of paragraph into the others rss thumbnails. If I would like to have thumbnails for monitoring, I would prefer to open the page comparison into a new tab, like a normal reading.
