How to poll simple website for updates?

I have a professor who randomly updates his website with homework due tomorrow and seems to expect us to check it every hour.

This sounds like a job for a program.

His website is simple and entirely html, not even a开发者_运维百科ny javascript. How could I programatically detect any changes/updates to his website?

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Check the Last-Modified Response header.

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Fetch and md5 the content of each page. Then store and compare with previous values. Note that this is sensitive down to the character level.

Alternativelly, setup a Google Alert for site:your-professors-website.com and have the updates delivered to your email or via rss.

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setup a cron job to periodically wget or curl the URL, then grep for relevant text, then send yourself an email if interesting results are found...