If you have used applications like Growl Site Monitor, Monitey or StatusCake, you must be aware of how handy they can be to monitor a website’s activity or downtime. These apps are designed to automatically notify you if the specified URL returns an unusual response or hits a 404. UrlMonitor is a similar Windows app with a clean design and minimal interface. It’s quite simple to use and allows you to monitor any kind of website for content changes such as missing links, file unavailability or deleted content, and alerts you by flashing its system tray icon, as well as displaying a 404 error in its response log. It quietly sits in the system tray without disrupting your workflow.
Weighing in at a mere 380kb, UrlMonitor is very lightweight app and comprises of a straightforward interface. It doesn’t require any installation either; just run its portable EXE file and begin using it. To start monitoring a website, enter its link in the URL field and specify the Delay time in seconds. The tool accepts delay times between 10 to 2147483 seconds. You can also optionally enter a custom tag or phrase that you want to monitor on the website. This feature can prove to be quite useful should you want to keep track of all activity relevant to that word or phrase. Upon clicking OK button, UrlMonitor starts running in the background. You can control the app via its notification icon.
The notification icon automatically starts blinking upon encountering an error. You can right-click this icon to choose further actions from the context menu, such as manually retrying for response, or viewing the last response log, which opens up the log window for the most recent server responses. You can also stop the application from monitoring by clicking the Exit button.
The response log comes handy for further analysis of the URL. For instance, during testing, I tried uploading a file to Imgur and launched the server response log after specifying the image link in the app. Upon deleting the link from the server, UrlMonitor clearly showed a 404 error in its server response window. It even reports further technical information that can come handy for webmasters or network administrators.
To sum it up, UrlMonitor is an extremely lightweight portable app that perfectly does the job it’s built for. It that works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Both 32-bit and 64-bit OS editions are supported.
