Find out when a website was last updated

Any ideas?

[Trenton]

I need to assess a few websites and one of the things I need to do is work out when each website was last updated. Anyone know how I can do this? Are there any free programs out there that can measure this?

[choster]

Determining when a site has been updated is difficult. If Citigroup has ten thousand pages in their site and they change one, how would you know except by spidering the whole thing regularly and comparing it against your local cache, or database of file sizes, or personal inspection?

Determining when a page has been updated is more straightforward. There are services and software of various levels of sophistication and price which monitor pages for changes in text strings. Have a look at [searchenginewatch.com...]

[Receptional]

Try looking for:

c4u
Morning papar
Disco watchman

All these do this. Of course, there is also Wayback.

Dixon.

[TallTroll]

If you know how, you can query the server for a TCP/IP field call "Last-Modified", although be aware that as this is a server header, it can be controlled by the Sysadmin to default to SystemTime - 5 hours, for instance, which would screw up the results

[Trenton]

Thanks guys, that's a lot of help!

[rayphilip]

here's a simple line of javascript I use.

javascript:alert(document.lastModified)

Cut and paste this into the address bar and hit enter. Only works with html pages though.

>>>edited to correct a typo ;)

[chewy]

I think Xenu will do this - you have to look at the exported results (delimited) rather than the report output.

Been using this fabulous tool for years and just learned of this feature.