Versionista recently showed up in the top results from del.icio.us, which made me laugh out loud. Versionista monitors web sites and not only alerts you when they change, but also shows you exactly how they changed. Sounds like I’ll switch to that, instead of Google Reader, for surfing Boing! Boing!
The Versionista home page highlights changes that the McCain and Obama campaigns have made to their respective websites, usually to hide embarassing material (well, technically McCain’s site is still up so they’re not hiding all the embarassing material).
I am, sadly, a version whore. When WordPress implemented versioning in 2.6, I was in heaven. Also, even though I know I don’t need to be so obsessive about it, I can’t help but generate and download a full site backup of this server every night . . . which in my case is a 12gb .tar file at the moment.
Anyway, I could not find any pricing on the Versionista web page, and didn’t feel like setting up an account. From other articles on the service, it is free to monitor two pages for changes. Anything beyond that involves monthly fees in the $16-$500/month rate. It would probably be as cheap to hire a college kid to write up a CURL-based tool to do the regular downloads and feed those into any number of diff products like HTML diff.