Watching Pages

Watching a Page

Watching a page is similar to putting it on a list of favorite pages. You will not be notified of changes, but you will be able to get there easily by going to your Watch List. To watch a page, select Watch from the More menu that is located at the top of every page.

You can see the list of your watched pages by going to Tools-> Watched Pages from the menu above.

Getting notifications of page changes

One would think that it would be possible to to subscribe to a page and get notified of any changes to the page. However, with a wiki, this is difficult. A single person editing a page may save it multiple times, resulting in an email notification each time and flooding your inbox with junk. Instead, page notification works via RSS. While RSS is not that well known yet, outside web circles, it is gaining popularity and is even included as part of the latest versions of Microsoft Outlook 2007.

A site that uses RSS generates an RSS feed. An RSS feed is simply a web page whose contents dynamically update whenever anyone goes to the web page. An example is http://www.denovosoftware.com/site/whatsnew.xml which is the RSS feed of the What's New page at De Novo Software. An RSS feed can be viewed as a regular page in a browser, but contains extra information that can be read by a specialized RSS Reader. RSS readers are commonly integrated into email programs. Outlook 2007 comes with an RSS Reader built in. Some other common RSS Readers are:

• Newsgator - integrates directly with versions of Outlook before 2007

Once you have an RSS Reader installed, you can point it to watch different pages in the Clinical Flow Cytometry Wiki. Simply go to Tools-> RSS Feeds from the main menu.

  Clicking this link will take you to a page that will allow you to get the RSS feed URL.

If you hover your mouse of the orange RSS button, you can right click the mouse and select Copy Shortcut. You can then paste the feed link into your RSS Reader. From then on, you can simply go to your folder in your Email client and quickly see what has changed.