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ChangeTracker Improved: Fine-Tuning the Feeds for Interestingness

ProPublica's ChangeTracker catches a dramatically shortened Civil Rights page. (Versionista)

This week, we rolled out a few updates to ChangeTracker, our tool that watches White House Web sites for changes.

First, we're no longer tracking changes at Recovery.gov and FinancialStability.gov. The two have grown from fledgling introductory sites into full-sized government, but, honestly, the changes they're making now just aren't that interesting. Of course, if you'd still like to track those sites, you can build your own ChangeTracker by following our easy how-to.

We're continuing to track WhiteHouse.gov. Which brings us to our second tweak: We've added frequency markers to the feeds. In each change notification, you'll now see "rare," "medium rare," "frequent" or "very frequent" to indicate how often the changed page gets updated.

We've found that updates to pages that rarely change are usually the most interesting. So to make things a bit more reader-friendly, we're cutting out default notifications of the "frequent" and "very frequent" changes. In our Twitter, RSS and e-mail updates, we're going to include only the "rare" and "medium rare" notifications.

If you're still interested in seeing every change, we have an RSS feed of that.

For more information on ChangeTracker, our posts about especially interesting changes, and a guide on how to make your own tracker for any Web site, check out the new and improved ChangeTracker home page.

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