New from DevShed this morning: Ever wondered if you could be emailed automatically whenever your favorite Web pages changed? Our intrepid developer didn't just wonder - he sat down and wrote some code to make it happen. Here's his story. Yes, the latest article from DevShed, Watching the Web covers the remote monitoring of a page to see if just about any page out there has changed since you last looked.

The code for this creation uses PHP (a good choice) using a MySQL database to track the URLs and the last time they were updated. The code for the project connects to the database, gets the URLs, bounces a check for the "Last-Modified" header off of the respective web server, and - voila! You know instantly if the page has been updated since you last looked. Now, I know what you're saying - it seems a little hokey to do it like that, so he does devise an alternate method using the MD5 checksum of the page to tell the difference, complete with code.