In case scraping doesn't work for a certain link, you could have a "limited" update feature: Download website html, compress and hash it and store locally; each update cycle, download it, compress, hash and compare to local copy. If it has changed, then simply light it up in the UI. For me, simply seeing that there's something new on the site I want tracked is enough information so I can visit it and check out the new article myself.
Of course, false positives are a downside. Someone fixing a typo shouldn't count as an update. I'm sure the community can think of settings for the "update sensitivity" where level 0 requires at least a new tag to appear on the page, level 1 requires a change of at least N characters, and level 2 notifies on even a change of one character.
I love this extension already and am willing to help out with PRs :-)
There are two sides to this kind of teaching. If you're MIT, you can afford to hire great lecturers who know to teach the students fundamental and deep truths about the tools they're using and not trivia. That way, they can generalize onto other tools, so anyone who studied git can quickly adapt to using cvs or svn. My university (in a developing country) is on the other side. Last semester was a disaster.
We had an AWS course, half of which was memorizing information about pricing and S3 tiers. If I were going into a job as an AWS guy, I'd definitely have to know that, but this is just third year of undergrad in CS :-/ and not a training course. The quizzes also had deliberately deceiving questions, which is the worst type of trivia!
Even better example. The Windows Server course was also compulsory (just like the AWS course) and mainly consisted of memorizing trivial information about context menus, which buttons to click and the licensing terms/durations/prices for different Windows Server versions. I'm jaded from the experience. Got my first two Cs in both since I spent time learning stuff described in the post instead of that nonsense.
Of course, false positives are a downside. Someone fixing a typo shouldn't count as an update. I'm sure the community can think of settings for the "update sensitivity" where level 0 requires at least a new tag to appear on the page, level 1 requires a change of at least N characters, and level 2 notifies on even a change of one character.
I love this extension already and am willing to help out with PRs :-)