Not so long ago I got an email from one of the readers asking if there is a way to be notified about site updates when the site doesn’t offer RSS feeds. And since there are plenty of popular sites that don’t provide any feeds I thought it may be a good idea to write about it. So if you’re interested here are some free tools that can do the job.

Monitor Webpages for Changes

If you’re a Firefox user then you can try Update Scanner. It’s an extension that lets you monitor webpages for changes. You have an option to choose how often the website should be checked for changes, and whether it should ignore the minor ones, such as the changes to numbers.

Have you ever received an error message when trying to open a Microsoft Word document? Was it an important file for work or school? Whatever the case may be, it is very frustrating to not be able to open a file for no reason. However, this post will show you how to repair such files for FREE!

Repair MyWord is a free program that will recover corrupt Microsoft Word files. It will recover Microsoft Word 6.0, Word 95, 97, 2000, XP, and 2003 files. Repair MyWord is an small executable file that requires no installation, which makes it a great utility to keep on a flash drive. Repair MyWord is available for nearly all versions of Windows. It has also been tested in Linux using Wine.

At first, Flock appealed to me in a purely superficial way. As you may have noticed, I’m a sucker for style, good design and pretty textures, and Flock certainly unites all of these features.

Fortunately, that’s not all there is to tell. Flock is based on Mozilla Firefox and was first released in 2005. Back then it may have been a little bit ahead of its time since social web was only in its beginnings. Recently however, Flock has enjoyed very positive media coverage and its popularity virtually exploded in the beginning of this year, reaching close to three million downloads and increasing the number of active users by 135% [Source via Wikipedia].

I am always mystified about why people would want to do this but there is now a way for you to read your Gmail email in a RSS reader.

Previously, it was very difficult, bordering on impossible. Gmail has a RSS feed which is called an “authenticated feed” which basically means you need to enter your username and password in order to access it. A lot of web-based RSS services, including Google Reader ironically enough, don’t support authenticated feeds. In fact, they still don’t. So what FreeMyFeed does is act as the middle man, taking your feed and swapping it for a proxy that the RSS service WILL accept.

Do you constantly find yourself explaining how to complete a task on the computer? Is it sometimes hard to put those instructions into words? The Jing Project allows you to demonstrate a task by snapping a picture of your screen or recording a video (with audio) of what you do and see.

What makes the Jing different from other screen capturing software?

Macs come with a really pleasing look. The interface is so polished that pretty much every Windows user envy it. If you’re on a PC longing for a Mac but can’t afford it yet, here is some free software to make your Windows PC look like a Mac. Keep in mind, these visual enhancements require additional processing power. So if you have a slow system you would probably do better without them.

Docks

We’ve covered Windows desktop docks before. Desktop docks are just indispensable if you want to make your PC look like a Mac. Docks can be used to launch programs and could well replace your Windows taskbar.