Frequently Asked Questions

We're not trying to supplant other information and alert services, we're trying to make their results better for you.

Imagine you had someone continuously go through those services, take all the different results and:

• Remove the duplicates (stopping Technorati and Google from pointing you to the same site)
• Filter unwanted results, such as hits from your own website
• Reorder and rank the results by date, relevance and popularity
• Keep track of what was said and how often, so you could review reports and graphs of the conversation

There are a couple of reasons why you might see this:

• Many blogs use a service called Feedburner that can track individual clicks in articles, resulting in us finding two identical articles, one from Feedburner that redirects to the actual article and the actual article itself.
• Some bad people on the internet setup spam blogs (splogs) in an attempt to draw people in and rip them off. They will scrape legitimate blogs and create a duplicate article with a different url, thus slipping past our defenses.

  Something to try if you are seeing a lot of this, is to set the "rank" choice at the top of your Watchlists page to something other than 0. This will filter out most of the splogs.

The Watchlister Widget isn't just an RSS reader, it actually pulls down results, filters them, discards old links you've already seen and then updates both the Watchlister site and the Dashboard RSS reader.

It does this in somewhat a unique way, so you may want to read the rest of this FAQ to be sure this is something you want to do.

When the widget updates your Watchlists, it will also update other users Watchlists as well.

In exchange for your computer doing some of the work for us, we figure the least we can do is give you a pro account upgrade for free.

Yes, anything you run on your computer will take some resources. However, we've taken precautions to limit how much is downloaded, how quickly updates occur, etc. so that any performance impact should be negligible.

Also, we launch the update process using the unix nice command. This lowers the updaters priority level, so that whatever else you are doing shoves the updater into the background until you are done.

First, make sure you are on the latest version of Growl. Second, make sure that the "Use Growl?" checkbox on the back of the widget is checked on the back of each widget you want to get Growl notifications for.

As soon as possible, but OS X's Dashboard is pretty sweet.