One of my favourite websites is a weekly news column called Letter From America, which offers a unique perspective of news in the US by a distinguished, retired journalist named Alistair Cooke. The website is actually an on-line version of a radio program which the BBC World Service broadcasts every weekend. It repeats the program several times through the day for the benefit of people listening in from different time zones all around the world. But I always manage to miss it, so it's really great to know that they have the text of the program online for viewing anytime. The only minor complaint I've had is that I'm never sure when the latest installment will be available on the website. So I have to resort to checking the website regularly for the latest installment. I will now show you how I used TrackEngine to provide a really neat solution to my problem.

Prerequisite: Enable your web browser with the "Track me!" button. If you're not a TrackEngine user yet, then sign up for a free account by clicking here. The registration process is simple and you'll receive your username and password by email shortly after you've signed up. There are a few places where you can enable your web browser with the "Track me!" button. At the QuickStart page, which briefly outlines the workings of TrackEngine for new users upon their first sign-in. At the My Bookmarks page, which gives existing users a quick means of enabling any web browser with the "Track me!" button.

Next, go to the BBC News | Letter From America site and click on the Track me! button. A dialog box will appear showing the title of the BBC web page and some options about how often you wish to track the page and keywords. Just leave these at their default settings and click on the Expert link near the top left-hand corner of the dialog box to show a further list of options. Scroll down to the one titled Please analyze and format: and change the default setting to Summarize new content and send me the page. Finally, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the OK button to save the settings.

You're all set! From now on, you will get Alistair Cooke's latest weekly column delivered to you by email once a week. It's neat because you don't have to remember which day of the week the new column is going to appear on, because TrackEngine checks the website for you everyday. And the weekly email that you'll receive contains only the new article, minus all the other stuff which you've probably seen before. It saves you the trouble of visiting the website everyday and looking all over the page for the new article.

By following the steps described above, you can also do the same thing for your own favourite weekly column. Some of these sites may already offer a kind of subscription service where you provide them with your email address and they'll send the new articles to you like a newsletter. But for the many sites that don't have such a service, TrackEngine enables you to do it yourself. And, of course, it works equally well even if it's a bi-weekly, fortnightly or monthly column.

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