The Department of Education still has not openned up their room block for the Federal Financial Aid Conference November 27th to the 30th (it was already open and fully booked at the MGN Las Vegas by this time last year), but I was trying to find a way to be notified as soon as they change the page. Granted, this conference is free and the room block does not fill up at the same speed as the Apple WWDC conference, but I wanted to see if it is possible to be notified as soon as it does open. Do you really want to have to stay at one of the secondary hotels or even worse?

While I have never used this service, I figured it was worth a try. I setup monitoring of the main confernce page with ChangeDetection.com. I set it to send an email to an email address that is setup on my iPhone using push notification, so there should not be a lag between the email being sent and receipt on the iPhone.

While not a guarentee, it is worth a try. If I find a little more time, I will test it out with my own site.

If you wanted to get really serious about this (and who really would), you could always sign up for a Pingdom account, but that starts at $9.95 a month after a 30-day free trial and is really meant for monitoring mission critical services.